Gilbert & George never cook and always eat out. Back in 1969, however, the artist duo hosted The Meal, an elaborate dinner party that included thirteen guests, Princess Margaret’s butler, a chef who prepared a meal from a Victorian cookery manual, and the guest of honor, artist David Hockney. Charlotte Birnbaum took a trip to London’s East End to visit the immaculately dressed pair to discuss The Meal and other curious projects from their fifty-year collaboration.

The only performances that make it all the way ...
Yes, but is it performable?

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the two group exhibitions “The only performances that make it all the way...“ and “Yes, but is it performable? Investigations on the Performative Paradox“ which were shown at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien in 2013 and 2016.

Gianni PettenaNon-Conscious Architecture

This publication surveys the work of Italian critic, architect, and visual artist Gianni Pettena. Focusing on a rich ten-year period of production that began in the mid-sixties, it brings new attention to the artistic and intellectual practice of a figure known primarily as one of the main exponents of the Radical Architecture movement.

Alex Cecchetti Tamam Shud
An Artist’s Novel

The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist’s novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.

Omar KholeifGoodbye, World!
Looking at Art in the Digital Age

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network.

Virgil Abloh“Insert Complicated Title Here”

“What’s my DNA?” Virgil Abloh asks to an overflowing auditorium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Abloh goes on to provide his audience with a “cheat code”—advice he wishes he had received as a student. He then unpacks a series of “shortcuts” for cultivating a “personal design language.” Trained as an architect and engineer, Abloh has translated the tools and techniques of his student days into the world of fashion, product design, and music.

Merlin Carpenter“The Outside Can’t Go Outside”

Why has there been so much interest in “surplus value” in recent years? In “The Outside Can’t Go Outside”, artist Merlin Carpenter considers how this term has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation. This much-hyped view is rejected in favor of a more rigorous Marxist interpretation of the nature of surplus value, and its role in a systematic law of value.

Erik Hagen, Mario Pfeifer (Eds.)Profit over Peace in Western Sahara
How commercial interests undermine self-determination in the last colony in Africa

Profit over Peace in Western Sahara examines the role of natural resources in the occupation of the Western Sahara, a territory considered by the United Nations to still be awaiting decolonization. Its liberation from colonial rule has come to a standstill due to Morocco’s continued military occupation of a part of the territory. The EU has ignored basic principles of international law in the region due to political reasons and financial self-interest, which has had dramatic consequences for the people of the territory.

Josephine Prydelapses in Thinking By the person i Am

In the body of work documented here, Pryde combines a series of color photographs of hands touching objects with a scale-model freight train and track, replete with miniaturized graffiti, that took visitors in a short ride through the exhibition. Through photography and sculpture, Pryde pays close attention to the nature of image making and the conditions display, subtly reworking codes and conventions to alter our cultural perception and understanding of each.

Su-Mei TseNested

Marked by her cosmopolitan origins, between Europe and Asia, and by an attention to the sonorous dimension of the world, the practice of Su-Mei Tse involves issues such as time, memory, musicality, and language. Like her exhibition “Nested,” this publication was conceived to be like a notebook: a form that brings together impressions that have occurred in everyday life—be they visual, sound, or memory related—and blends them in a subjective and intuitive way, allowing a whole network of echoes and correspondences to be deployed.

Marcel OdenbachBeweis zu nichts / Proof of Nothing

Departing from Marcel Odenbach’s eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Beweis zu nichts / Proof of Nothing examines new works by Odenbach and contextualizes them within a broader context. Named after an early poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, the exhibition reflected the atmosphere of the postwar period that dominates Bachmann’s poetry, which itself is shaped as much by the search for authenticity and truthfulness as it is by the traumatic memory of the past.

Ellen CantorA history of the world as it has become known to me

Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor’s work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice.

Isabelle GrawThe Love of Painting
Genealogy of a Success Medium

Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw’s insights are further discussed and put to the test.

Jennifer BornsteinPrints

Prints by Jennifer Bornstein gathers together a body of work encompassing her latest projects in printmaking during a recent fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. These works are contextualized by earlier projects in drawing, film, and artist books that span the 1990s to the present.

Tom NicholsonLines towards Another

Lines towards Another is the first anthology on the work of Australian contemporary artist Tom Nicholson. Spanning drawing, sculpture, public actions, sound, installation, video, and performance, Nicholson’s work since the 1990s has engaged with critical questions around history, politics, narrative, and representation. Presenting new research on the artist and providing an unprecedented overview of two decades of work, the book features eleven essays and two interviews, alongside richly illustrated project pages and texts by the artist.

How do artists work today? Has the pluralism of art given way to a pluralism of roles that artists may occupy? What are the contemporary conditions of labour producing this new state of affairs, and what re-skilling does it ask of artists? These are some of the questions addressed in The Artist As.

Cosmin Costinaș, Ana Janevski (Eds.)Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?
The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions

The choreographic turn in the visual arts from 1958 to 1965 can be identified by the sudden emergence of works created by different visual artists around the world. Each used dance or choreographic procedures to reinvent, reimagine, and reimage how the visual arts produced and conceived its images and objects. Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, this publication proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century, and looks at its correlations with other shifts in practices, discourses, and broader society.

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence.

Natasha Ginwala, Daniel Muzyczuk (Eds.)The Museum of Rhythm

The Museum of Rhythm is a speculative institution that engages rhythm as a tool for interrogating the foundations of modernity and the sensual complex of time in daily experience. When entering a larger cultural infrastructure such as the art museum, it juxtaposes modern and contemporary art with ethnographic research, cinema, music, and scientific instruments to set in resonance a critical apparatus and conduct exercises in Rhythmanalysis. This book, and the exhibition upon which it is based, is an outcome of durational research that sees art as one of the means by which the ideologies of rhythm are implemented.

Cécile B. Evans(1770–25k)

With (1770–25k) Cécile B. Evans presents materials from three recent video works included in her 2016 solo exhibition “Timeline for a Copy without Origins” at the Bielefelder Kunstverein. The amalgamations of text and image appear in the form of audiovisual transcripts, much of the material scavenged verbatim from popular culture and the user-generated web content of platforms like YouTube, Craigslist, and Reddit.

Alex Klein, Milena Hoegsberg (Eds.)Myths of the Marble

Myths of the Marble documents a group exhibition that took place in 2017 at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Curated by Alex Klein and Milena Hoegsberg, the exhibition reflects upon how the “virtual” has been engaged by contemporary artists as a way to consider the world as a site of possibility and limitation that both permeates physical space and online experience.

Ineke HansWas ist Loos?

This publication was created on the occasion of Dutch designer Ineke Hans’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The exhibition—its title a pun merging the German phrase for “What’s going on?” with the name of architect Adolf Loos—provided an overview of Ineke Hans’s recent work while also exploring the present and the future of design.

What Is Different? is the title of this year’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on truth study centre, a cycle of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts. Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Organized by curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, the experimental architectural program“Project Phalanstère” consisted of a series of site-specific artworks in the Parisian suburbs. From 2003 to 2014, these projects developed a creative space extended in time: in contrast with the duration of the work schedule, in which one task follows another, the simultaneity of life’s forces asserted its rhythm. This book extends the recollection and mental reconstruction of the artworks and reconstitutes the project's political aims.

Communists Anonymous understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated—in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.

Armen AvanessianMiamification

Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second person—and a philosopher’s reflections in the infinity pool of the art world—this book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary. Can we, it asks, advance from conditions of financial feudalism and climate change to a progressive poetics of the digital?

This book is the first survey of the art and practice of Art+Positive, a significant affinity group of ACT UP New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Staging self-initiated actions, and also participating in larger demonstrations organized by ACT UP, Art+Positive practiced an improvisational approach to activism at the intersection of the AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Jon K Shaw, Theo Reeves-Evison (Eds.)Fiction as Method

In this anthology, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word.

Lori WaxmanKeep Walking Intently
The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture. Keep Walking Intently traces the meandering and peculiar footsteps of these avant-garde artists as they moved through the city, encountering the marvelous, studying the environment, and re-enchanting the banal.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. The shifts that occurred in the art field during this time were accompanied by explicit critique and academic analysis that aimed to make the genesis of these transformations comprehensible. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out.

Peter G. RoweDesign Thinking in the Digital Age

In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design.

Oraib ToukanSundry Modernism
Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism

With Sundry Modernism, Oraib Toukan presents an informal register of modernist Palestinian architecture—an assemblage of images and stories collected from 2013 to 2015 in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho. Using her photographs as conversation prompts with various residents, historians, and architects, Toukan places the anecdotes collected thereby into political and historical context, weaving together narrative and critique.

Cevdet ErekSSS
How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet

SSS: How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet is, at first glance, exactly what it claims to be: an in-depth manual for staging a private (or public) performance, in which one uses both hands and a carpet to imitate the sounds of water making contact with land. Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek’s book includes diagrams and photographs, which illustrate possible methods for producing this effect, while also addressing theoretical and methodological issues related to the representation of nature.

Charlotte BirnbaumBon! Bon!
On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine
On the Table V

People have used honey, dates, and fruits to sweeten their dishes since time immemorial, but with the introduction of sugar—“white gold”—into cooking and baking, a whole array of delightful flavors and culinary possibilities was unearthed. Sugar was the building block for edible sculptures and model palaces made for festivals and celebrations thousands of years ago, and the main ingredient in lavish creations for Rococo and Baroque banquets. In Bon! Bon!, Charlotte Birnbaum uncovers the wonderful world of all things sugary through surprising anecdotes and historical accounts, each accompanied by delectable recipes that are sure to satisfy any sweet tooth.

Visions of the NowStockholm Festival for Art and Technology

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966. Lundh’s project took place in 2013 and brought together international artists, musicians, theorists, and scientists for a three-day festival of lectures, panels, performances, sound pieces, installations, and screenings.

e-flux journal Jalal Toufic
What Was I Thinking?

What Was I Thinking? is an initiation into thinking. With a mind that is extremely analytical and yet extremely capable of rendering all kinds of knowledge and experiences permeable to each other, Jalal Toufic creates here a “summa,” but an open-ended one. He looks into the arts as if they were the privileged site of thinking, even when they inevitably fail, and still confronts his insights/thoughts with texts taken from the traditional religions and mystics of the past.—Etel Adnan

Knut EbelingThere Is No Now
An Archaeology of Contemporaneity

Drawing together discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms, this book examines a material conception of temporality that makes it possible to develop a critique of the philosophical discourse on presence. Claiming that “there is no now,” Ebeling develops an archaeology of contemporaneity according to which the traces of the contemporary can only be secured through visual or material operations, not historical ones.

Annika BenderDeath of an Art Critic /
Tod einer Kritikerin

This book is an adaptation of Annika Bender’s lecture “Jump! You Fuckers!” which was presented at Kunsthalle Bern in the context of a series on overproduction and ambivalence in contemporary art. Annika Bender was one of the pseudonyms of artists Dominic Osterried and Steffen Zillig, who wrote the blog Donnerstag (now discontinued) under her name. To make the criticism she proposed possible, and make public its conditions and inherent contradictions—as well as articulate the reasons for her disappearance—it proved necessary to confer Bender to the archive.

ars viva 2018Anna-Sophie Berger, Oscar Enberg, Zac Langdon-Pole

Since 1953, the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. has awarded the ars viva Prize to young artists living in Germany. This year, it goes to Anna-Sophie Berger (*1989), Oscar Enberg (*1988), and Zac Langdon-Pole (*1988). The prize includes two exhibitions at renowned art institutions in Germany and Belgium, the ars viva catalogue, and an artist residency on Fogo Island (Canada).

Anne Faucheret, David Jourdan (Eds.)The Promise of Total Automation

The exhibition “The Promise of Total Automation” investigated our relationship to a world of machines, technological objects, and electronic devices. The prospect of a fully automated future—while acutely reshaping the notions of work, production, and value creation—also feeds emancipatory scenarios ultimately leading to the end of labor. Total automation is upon us but its liberating promise is yet to be claimed. This book surveys the literature on that story. It tracks its fabric, layers, and mediations, and unfolds a bibliography and chronology of automation and of its promises.

Studio for Propositional Cinemain relation to a Spectator:

A compendium of essays, scripts, poems, and proposals, in relation to a Spectator: was compiled by Studio for Propositional Cinema—an anonymous artist collective founded in 2013—for their eponymous exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. The book investigates notions of the script, staging, and the conditions of the exhibition itself.

Rethinking Density: Art, Culture, and Urban Practices considers new perspectives and discussions related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, coping strategies, and experimental approaches, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory.

Sam ThorneSchool: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education

Sam Thorne’s School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education is a chronicle of self-organized art schools and artist-run education platforms that have emerged since 2000. Comprising a series of twenty conversations conducted by Thorne with the artists, curators, and educators behind these schools, the book maps a territory at once fertile and contested. Spanning projects in London, Lagos, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Ramallah, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg, among other locations, these critical dialogues respond to spiraling student debt, the MFA system, and the “pedagogical turn,” while offering proposals for the future of art education.

Michael TedjaThe Holarium: Negeren Series 818:32

Unlike a number of artists who have begun to use negation, detachment, and inaccessibility as tools to reflect upon and problematize the narratives mapped onto them as members of diasporic or immigrant communities, Michael Tedja plays the other extreme. His work seems to exceed and absorb the institutions that attempt to codify him one way or another. Whereas his peers may seek to transcend identity as such, Tedja’s practice is hypersubjective and all-encompassing.

Atelier Bow-Wow with K. Michael HaysArchitectural Ethnography

In this in-depth conversation with architectural theorist K. Michael Hays, Yoshi Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow reflect on representation, occupation, and the democracy of architecture. They unfold their concept of an “ecology of livelihood,” wherein shadowless figures, objects, and spaces coexist with construction details. Explaining their belief in the behavioral capacities of humans, architecture, and nature, Tsukamoto and Kaijima reveal the generous spirit of their work, and the importance of pushing such capacities to their most yielding limits.

e-flux journalArt without Death
Conversations on Russian Cosmism

According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge. This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics.

Heman ChongIfs, Ands, or Buts

The catalogue for Heman Chong’s first solo museum exhibition in mainland China, at the Rockbund Art Museum, provides an insightful and critical look into the Singaporean artist’s recent practice. To address the centrality of language, books, and the act of reading in Chong’s oeuvre, this publication features newly commissioned texts from a variety of contributors. Ifs, Ands, or Buts is illustrated with images of the entirety of works included in the show reproduced alongside documentation of Chong’s correspondence and collaboration with Ken Liu, as well as a section dedicated to the humorous tabloid stories from Chong’s work Papaya Daily.

Craig KalpakjianIntelligence

Among the first artists in his generation to employ digital software in the creation of art objects, Craig Kalpakjian engages with both historical art discourses and contemporary issues. In his work, Kalpakjian focuses on the seduction of technology and digital space from a critical position, questioning utopian ideals and suggesting darker implications. Intelligence considers the ideas of artificial intelligence exhibited by machines, as seen in the Sony AIBO robotic dog, and human intelligence, like that which is gathered through interpersonal contact by the US military in accordance with the “US Army Field Guides Manual on Interrogation,” a guide that prohibits abusive techniques of torture.

Louise Schouwenberg (Ed.)Material Utopias

In the slipstream of conceptual art, the intimate interweaving of meaning and materialization in art and design came to be discredited in the second half of the twentieth century. The master’s program Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut put an end to this tradition by abolishing the unproductive hierarchy separating “concept” and “making,” “content” and “process.” In this publication, various authors reflect on the history of dematerialization and deskilling, the manifold meanings of materials in art and design, and the challenges for education when the innovative power of the artistic process is celebrated.

Asta GrötingBERLIN FASSADEN

This publication accompanies the first comprehensive presentation of Asta Gröting’s project BERLIN FASSADEN. For her exhibition at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Gröting covered the walls and floors with sculptural silicone impressions of Berlin facades containing traces of bullet holes from the Second World War. Functioning like slow-exposure photographs, the sculptures capture the history of the facades, from the bullet’s impact during the war to the present day. Gröting reconstructs wounds as architectural traces and translates them into abstract pictures.

Systemics brings together a collection of new writing and curatorial projects that unfolded at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, over a two-year period from 2013 to 2014. Contained here are its various parts: details of the four core exhibitions and related events, two commissioned exhibitions, and four essays, together comprising the Systemics series program as a whole. Like any series, it unfolds over time, in associative parts, using descriptive and poetic exhibition titles to develop a cumulative experience.

Marika Kuźmicz, Łukasz Ronduda (Eds.)Workshop of the Film Form

Workshop of the Film Form provides an in-depth overview of the achievements of Warsztat Formy Filmowej (WWF; Workshop of the Film Form), a group of avant-garde artists who were working at the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz, Poland, between 1970 and 1977. It examines all aspects of WFF’s activity, from their films, photographic experiments, video art, and performative actions to their teaching work, which includes previously unexplored pedagogical contributions to the National Film School.

Daniela Zyman, Cory Scozzari (Eds.)Allan Sekula
OKEANOS

This publication intersperses essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers with a selection of Allan Sekula’s seminal texts and excerpts from his private notebooks. Made and written across the decades, Sekula’s sketches and texts focus on maritime space and the material, economic, and ecological implications of globalization. In projects such as his magnum opus Fish Story (1989–95), or films like Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010), Sekula provided a view from and of the sea. This publication expands on these oceanic themes, seeking to honor the scope and complexity of the late artist-theorist’s work, and situate his ideas in current political, social, and environmental discourses.

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. Art historian T. J. Demos analyzes contemporary visual culture—popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects—to consider how the term works ideologically, proposing more than merely a description of objective geological periodization.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide.

Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

Theo EshetuThe Body Electric

The Body Electric is the first comprehensive survey of video artist and filmmaker Theo Eshetu’s extensive body of work. It provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s engagement with a variety of genres and media, including experimental cinema, essay and documentary films, large-scale video installations, and live performances.

Mari ShawWords, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit
The Noble Art of Collecting, Book One

Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit is the first of Mari Shaw’s series The Noble Art of Collecting. With examples of unexpected collectors and serendipitous outcomes, Shaw investigates the obscure desires that shape art collecting and the public goodwill that results from it.

Bik Van der Pol (Ed.)School of Missing Studies

The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognized “the missing” as a matter of urgency. Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernization and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning, the School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise, to trust that seeing, and to set one’s own pedagogical terms.

Simryn Gill, Michael TaussigBecoming Palm

Becoming Palm is the outcome of a conversation between two friends, artist Simryn Gill and anthropologist Michael Taussig, addressing the complexities of palm oil and “the enormous transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop engenders” (Taussig) in two disparate geographical locations, Southeast Asia and South America.

Quinn LatimerLike a Woman
Essays, Readings, Poems

Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. Her texts record specters and realities of culture, migration, and displacement, compounding the vagaries of rhetoric and poetics with those of personal history and criticism. This collection of Latimer’s recent essays and poems examines issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making.

Andrew Goodhouse (Ed.)When Is the Digital in Architecture?

When is the digital in architecture? What are the conditions that led architects to integrate digital tools into their practices? There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone of Archaeology of the Digital and the start of an investigation into other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

Blake RayneTense and Spaced Out
Polar Nights, Glacial Chaos and the Ecology of Misery

Blake Rayne’s approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, dissolve, and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition. Rather, they are shaped by always-evolving social, institutional, and physical relations.

In the media theatre of contemporary culture, a drama unfolds: While the human sense of “the present” is challenged by the immediacy of analog signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non-)sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves. At that moment, human-related phenomenological analysis clashes with the media-archaeological close reading of the technological event, in an impossible effort to let the temporeal articulate itself.

Raqs Media CollectiveWe Are Here, But Is It Now?
(The Submarine Horizons of Contemporaneity)

It is said that we know more about far-away galaxies than we do about the bottom of the oceans on earth. One could say something similar about our relationship to the future and to the contemporary. Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? How to find and share sources of illumination in submarine darkness? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

Dexter SinisterNotes on the Type, Time, Letters & Spirits

Three interconnected palimpsest essays recount (1) the backstory of a “meta” font recently updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition book series, (2) a broad history of the rationalization of letterforms that considers the same typeface from “a higher point of disinterest,” and (3) a pending proposal for a sundial designed to operate in parallel physical and digital realms. Along the way they contemplate the ambiguous nature of our shared idea of *time* itself.

David ClaerboutOlympia
(The Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years)

This publication documents the first iteration of Belgian artist David Claerbout’s project Olympia, a digital simulation of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Conceived to last one thousand years, Claerbout’s simulation uses real-time weather data to present the slow decay of the stadium over the coming millennium. Projected onto monumental screens in the Boiler House at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin from late summer 2016 to spring 2017, Olympia aims to exceed the human ability to imagine time, thus radically surpassing our own experience of the world.

Otobong NkangaLuster and Lucre

Otobong Nkanga’s first monograph, Luster and Lucre, charts an intensely productive period from 2013 to 2016, which includes exhibitions at the 8th Berlin Biennale; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; KADIST, Paris; and M HKA, Antwerp. Its title encapsulates the complex concerns that underpin these shows: “luster,” the illustrious shining of materials; and “lucre,” profits and gains.

It’s easy to rant about the fashion industry. Nowadays, a large part of it is based on producing and consuming vast amounts of clothing. Collections are manufactured at dizzying speeds and sold for extremely low or incredibly high prices. This fast-changing business is hard to break into, or out of. How, as a designer, do you deal with this system and come up with innovative ways of designing, producing, promoting, financing, and selling? How do you meet the needs of today’s consumers and anticipate the needs of tomorrow’s world?

This catalogue illustrates Stephan Dillemuth’s elaborate solo show at the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, through installation photographs as well as texts by art historian Kerstin Stakemeier and theorist Helmut Draxler. The exhibition presented newly conceived works alongside works from the 1980s exhibited for the first time.

In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-state’s exclusion of refugees as people out of place. Andrew Herscher’s Displacements: Architecture and Refugee, the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.

Over the past four years, the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) has called attention to exhibitions, artists, and curators from diverse African perspectives while boosting new areas of debate. I am built inside you, C&’s first book, is a compilation of eighteen pieces published since the magazine was launched in 2013.

The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 is the first monograph of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves, and the outcome of her solo show at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville in 2015. It gathers more than twenty projects realized between 1991 and 2015, including rarely viewed early works that help us see her most recent production from a new perspective. This publication also collects a selection of Alves’s writings and contextualizes her work in the political and cultural debates from the 1980s, when she became an activist and an early participant in discourses around “postcolonialism” and “ecology.”

Uchroniaduplicate > do not create, infiltrate > do not exhibit, exceed > do not belong, appear > do not claim, delegate > do not restrict

Uchronia is a project initiated by the artists Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan) in 2014, which emanates from the analysis of individual or collective attitudes and behaviors produced in the public space of a given city. In response to the increasing transformation of public spaces into functional areas toward which individuals are guided to fulfill a given activity, the two artists call upon citizens to become uchronists, to infiltrate public life with physical modules coming from daily behaviors, synchronized and adjusted according to context.

Mai Abu ElDahab, November Paynter, Marnie Slater (Eds.)These are the tools of the present
Beirut Cairo

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories, and the often accidental influences that have shaped how their practices have developed.

Martin BeckAn Organized System of Instructions

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Program” at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts comprised a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and displays that drew on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building at Harvard University. The sequence of explorative strategies—each node of which Beck considered an “episode”—lent particular attention to the founding aspirations of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue.

Lívia Páldi (Ed.)The Site Residency

Imagined as a residency that would result in no material production, the Site Residency was conceptually grounded in theories and practices of withdrawal and in the critical questioning of creation, materiality, and objectified artistic output, paying tribute to the artistic strategies from the 1960s and ’70s. This publication presents various visual and textual materials of the residency’s three participating artists, Annika Eriksson, Susanne Kriemann, and Agnieszka Polska, including the “results” of their invited ghostwriters who translated the experience of the artists and curators into literary fiction.

Margarida Mendes (Ed.)Matter Fictions

Matter Fictions addresses fiction as a mode of producing reality as well as the significance of matter—animal, vegetable, mineral, hybrid—beyond binaries. Recounting a partial history of our relation with matter, the eponymous exhibition at Museu Coleção Berardo (May 4–August 21, 2016) explored how the crossover between cosmological narratives, spatial revolutions of concrete poetry, and hypertextual and territorial fictions might impact our understanding of human agency in a time that calls for action on climate change and technocratic policies.

Jesse JonesThe Other North

Jesse Jones’s 2013 film The Other North represents the culmination of her research in South Korea and the Demilitarized Zone. It features Korean actors reenacting The Steel Shutter, a little-known documentary of a “conflict resolution therapy session” held by American psychologist Carl Rogers in the early 1970s with a group of individuals from various political and socioeconomic backgrounds in Northern Ireland. Here, fact and fiction press up against each other and the conflict of one North is reinscribed in another.

Pierre BismuthThings I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them—Towards a Catalogue Raisonné

This publication comprises two volumes: a booklet accompanying Pierre Bismuth’s 2015 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, and a catalogue raisonné indexing his typically serial and often humorous work of the last three decades, from five-minute paintings of recipe cards from women’s magazines (1986–87) to fried-chicken-flavored polyethylene sculptures (2015). Just like the idiosyncratic mix of conceptualism and appropriation refined by Bismuth throughout his career, Things I Remember I Have Done, But Don’t Remember Why I Did Them suggests how easily authorship and intentionality can be undermined, even erased—and Bismuth is not exempt from his own treatment.

Tom HumphreysPlates

Tom Humphreys—Plates is an artist’s book documenting works produced between 2009 and 2016 using industrially manufactured plates as a support medium. This extensive volume loosely catalogues four hundred and twenty works from this series at a one-to-one scale, in precisely rendered photographs.

Olafur EliassonGreen light
An artistic workshop

Green light is a project initiated by artist Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Conceived as a field of production and mutual learning, Green light works with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and NGOs to fabricate an unlimited edition of fully functional lamps: geometric, stackable modules made from recyclable materials and fitted with a welcoming green light. Providing fundraising and education opportunities, Green light workshops first took place in Vienna in 2016, and have since been hosted at the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

Leonard QylafiOccurrence in Present Tense
Ndodhi në kohën e tashme

Recollection is the presence of the past in the here and now; it shapes our understanding of our places and lives, their histories and changes. As experience becomes fact, the past turns into objective matter. Leonard Qylafi’s artistic practice takes such material records as books, films, or photos as points of departure for examining this process of change. His paintings and videos are as much investigations of the processes shaping the narration of events in his home country of Albania as they are reflections on the nature of the image as such.

Katja NovitskovaIf Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes

Today almost all aspects of human—and increasingly nonhuman—lives are being modeled by software. Transcending the limits of our planet, data collection has become a fundamental tool with which to map the earth and beyond. Katja Novitskova’s catalogue If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, published for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, addresses emerging potentialities between visual culture, big-data-driven processes, and ecology.

Hearings: A ReaderContour Biennale 8

Titled "Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium," the eighth Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, addresses the nation-state system and the realm of justice today. The editorial approach of its accompanying reader, Hearings, borrows from the juridicial and musical spheres. Launched as the online journal of the biennial, the reader pairs texts or image-based contributions, allowing for a sense of tension and affinity to develop in the feedback loop of the two voices. Relationships around the artwork as site of evidence and testimony are thus reoriented. The multidimensional readings are not restricted to the active apparatus of law and discipline, but instead seek to unravel the synchronies of our times—the mesh of injustice in our midst.

Cecilia VicuñaRead Thread
The Story of the Red Thread

From the 1970s to the present, Cecilia Vicuña’s work has engaged with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America involving red-colored thread. The Chilean artist’s performances, site-specific installations, paintings, and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language as well as the ritual dimension of menstrual blood in the construction of solidarity through femininity and maternity, to support and continue life. Appearing on the occasion of Vicuña’s installation in Athens for documenta 14, Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuña’s work.

Shirana ShahbaziFirst Things First

The catalogue First Things First comprises a selection of images from a number of Shirana Shahbazi’s photographic series created over the past ten years. The presentation of some fifty works is not necessarily categorically or linearly organized; rather, it appears completely free of hierarchy, with photographic styles, subjects, and techniques displayed on equal footing. First Things First emphasizes a juxtapositional approach, a dynamic and free arrangement of various subjects and styles.

Merlin CarpenterMIDCAREER PAINTINGS

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist's seven galleries and marked "not for sale." This publication documents these "paintings," the particular mix of playfulness and earnestness in Carpenter's art, and how the works thematize the limbo of the "midcareer" artist as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

Ernesto Neto and the Huni KuinAru Kuxipa—Sacred Secret

“Aru Kuxipa,” the exhibition held at TBA21 – Augarten, was a vibrant demonstration of ancestral futures, a term that unpacks potentials for creating a future that is also deeply rooted in cultures of tradition. Through multiple exchanges between members of thirty-two Huni Kuin communities in Brazil, this publication brings together threads from anthropology, art, and science that are interwoven, like the movement of a serpent, with essay contributions, oral histories, drawings, and traditional song. Together, they outline the way unique kinships produced within an indigenous cosmo-vision can shape our present moment

Roee RosenLive and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories

Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is a bilingual edition of short writings by Roee Rosen. At the heart of this collection are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical-political critique, humor and eroticism.

Olaf Holzapfel / Nahum TevetThe Rough Law of Gardens

The Rough Law of Gardens documents Olaf Holzapfel and Nahum Tevet’s eponymous joint exhibition and explores the intergenerational differences between two unique artists. Both artists’ work rejects the global logic of growth and traverses the bounds of sculpture and painting: each of their practices involves ideas to do with materiality, learning, and memory.

Omar Berrada (Ed.)seepage/ritual
The 2017 Abraaj Group Art Prize

Providing an important platform for new and ambitious work from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, the ninth installment of the Abraaj Group Art Prize features “seepage/ritual,” an exhibition with the work of winner Rana Begum and the three short-listed artists: Sarah Abu Abdallah, Doa Aly, and Raha Raissnia. This publication is conceived as a parallel exhibition in book form, and contains original interventions by and in collaboration with the artists.

Armen AvanessianOverwrite
Ethics of Knowledge—Poetics of Existence

The original ideals of the Enlightenment research university and the rise of aesthetics in modernity have been decisive in shaping neoliberal capitalism. How, then, might we endeavor to change the academic status quo? Philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian argues that the ethical dimension of knowledge can produce a new reality. Looking beyond aesthetics and its critical imagination, can the speculative poetics of collaborative writing free us from the dominant regime of the academy and, by extension, the art world?

Mario Garcí­a TorresAn Arrival Tale

Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artist’s works in the TBA21 collection from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary societies. It examines the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between departure, displacement, and return.

Sven LüttickenCultural Revolution
Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy

In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lütticken focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution, whose reshaping of art’s autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts. In a present moment teeming with erosions—where even history and the human are called into question—Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy reconsiders these changing values, for relegating such notions safely to the past betrays their possibilities for potential today.

Minouk LimUnited Paradox

What role does historiography play in the formation of the present? How does contemporary experience inform the commemoration of historical events or lack thereof? Minouk Lim explores history in the present tense—its media representation, collective memory, ritual, and trauma—through her exhibition, publication, and broadcasting station United Paradox.

Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam WatsonCityCat Project 2006–2016

CityCat Project 2006–2016 is the record of an extraordinary collaboration between American artist Dave Hullfish Bailey and senior Aboriginal writer and activist Sam Watson. The collaboration is structured around Maiwar Performance, in which the CityCat ferries that ply the Brisbane River (Maiwar) execute unannounced maneuvers near a site of significance to the Aboriginal people who lived on the lands around Brisbane before British colonization in the early nineteenth century.

Helke BayrlePortikus Under Construction, 1992–2016

In 1992, Helke Bayrle began videotaping the installation of each exhibition at the Portikus exhibition space. These videos form a remarkable and intimate archive of the storied Frankfurt contemporary art institution and the exceptional artists and personnel that have worked within it. Coinciding with the launch of a website containing all of Bayrle’s Portikus videos, this publication pays tribute to the artist’s extraordinary work, through a comprehensive timeline, video stills, and statements by past and current directors and curators.

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through which channels does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background.

Edgar LeciejewskiTones

Edgar Leciejewski spent six months as an artist-in-residence with Fogo Island Arts in 2014. Tones brings together new work stemming from the Leipzig-based artist’s time on the island, including large-scale collages, photographs of natural elements, and precarious sculptures composed of objects found on the shore. Taken together the works are a collection and an archive of time shown in modern images, raising questions on how we contemplate ideas of nature. This publication features essays by Bill Arning and Zoë Gray, as well as a conversation between the artist and Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Reto PulferZustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions

In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer’s comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions, follows the artist’s work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist’s novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, one-off exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances. Categories such as living ceramics, food advice, ghostology, synesthesia, and transformation are woven throughout the book, giving unique insight into the ideas and imagination that are part of the work itself.

Luca Lo Pinto (Ed.)One, No One and One Hundred Thousand

This publication documents the 2016 exhibition “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand,” which took place at Kunsthalle Wien, Karlsplatz. Curated by Luca Lo Pinto, the show took its inspiration from Oulipo, a literary strategy whose objective was to propose new “structures” for writing that were mathematical in nature. Using A Thousand Billion Poems, a 1961 book by Raymond Queneau, one of Oulipo’s founders, as a manifesto for the exhibition, nine artists were invited to create new works in a display that would change depending on the wishes of the visitor.

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalisation, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualising them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art tells the story of those interventions, dwelling in particular on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

Goldin+SennebyThe Exquisite Corpse of August Nordenskiöld

In the ancient art of alchemy, some elements can change to other states of matter while others cannot. At least not without magic. And a touch of trickery. For some time now, Goldin+Senneby have been interested in a utopian alchemist named August Nordenskiöld (1754–1792) who sought to create enough gold from inferior metals to permanently abolish its value, and the tyranny of money with it. The Exquisite Corpse of August Nordenskiöld contains seven essays written by a historian of ideas, a sociologist of finance, a literary and cultural historian, a stage magician, an artist, an anthropologist, and a poet.

Robert Stadler, Alexis Vaillant (Eds.)On Things as Ideas

This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.

For the 1st Asia Biennial/5th Guangzhou Triennial, artist Sara van der Heide converted a public library in Guangzhou, China, into a restaging of the Goethe-Institut's German Library and Information Centre of Pyongyang, which operated from 2004 to 2009. Van der Heide’s German Library was to offer a set of public cultural programs: a group exhibition, video program, performances, and seminar. However, at the last minute the project was censored by the Chinese Cultural Bureau, turning what was to be an investigation of libraries and the institutional sharing of culture into an intimate reflection on power and censorship, political art, and the historical experiences shared across formerly divided Germany and the two Koreas.

Joanna Warsza (Ed.)I Can’t Work Like This
A Reader on Recent Boycotts and Contemporary Art

In recent years, artists and curators have often been confronted with the political dilemma of engagement or disengagement. The ideological, economic, or ethically objectionable circumstances of certain biennials and art exhibitions have raised the question of whether to continue and, if so, under what circumstances, with what consequences, and to what ends? From 2013 to 2015, biennials in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Sydney, and São Paulo demonstrated that curating and art production can’t just carry on as if nothing had happened.

Daniel Birnbaum, Kim WestLife on Sirius
The Situationist International and the Exhibition after Art

How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists’ anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord’s dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists’ confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation.

This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art.

Jesse Birch (Ed.)Black Diamond Dust

This publication expands a 2014 multisite contemporary art exhibition that took place in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a small city on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island. The title refers to coal mining, an industry that has formed and fragmented communities through economic development, racial segregation, and labor inequity, while fueling the modern world. In this book, forgotten or under-acknowledged histories are investigated and discussed along with cultural forms that surround the practices of international coal mining. Contemporary artworks, poetry, essays, literature, folk songs, and archival images come together to extract meaning from this fossilized black carbon that continues to power our cities.

This book offers a first report on the activities of the Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC), an association based in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. CATPC brings together a unique gathering of individuals—along with its members and partner institutions that are engaged in dialogue with it—and attempts to rethink postcolonial power relations within the global art world.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #12Winter 2016/17

This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world. And so we find Vincenzo Latronico attempting to get in touch with E.T., a collection of Lucy McKenzie’s illusory quodlibets, a conversation between Jumana Manna and Robert Wyatt on art and ethics, along with other points of view from Sarah Demeuse, Mark de Silva, Jocelyn Penny Small, Abigail Reynolds, James Langdon & Mathew Kneebone, Johan Hjerpe, and the inimitable 9mother9horse9eyes9.

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plants—past, present, extant, and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives.

Alex Coles (Ed.)EP Vol. 2
Design Fiction

The second volume in the EP series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains. Newly commissioned interviews, artist projects, and essays shed light on topics such as parafiction and algorithmic ambiguity. Included in the volume is one of the final interviews to be published with novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco; a conversation with Bruce Sterling, in which the science-fiction author responds to designers who reference his writings; and design theorist Vilém Flusser’s 1966 essay “On Fiction,” in its first English translation.

Chus Martí­nezClub Univers

This book is the result of ongoing research into historical and current artistic practices that explore new paradigms of experience. It is the first volume in a series of books that focuses on what is happening both inside and outside of the art institute.

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. This publication analyzes the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context, through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees. The contributions in this volume, by international curators, artists, critics, and theoreticians, deal with conditions of decontextualization and displacement, encounters between the local and the foreign, as well as the satisfaction of basic human needs.

Victor ManLuminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough

Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough is an artist’s book focusing on Victor Man’s series of paintings first exhibited as part of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and later developed for a solo exhibition at Galeria Plan B, Berlin. The book includes essays by poet and translator Bogdan Ghiu, curator Mihnea Mircan, and literary critic Laura Pavel.

Eberhard HavekostInhalt

Inhalt concentrates on Eberhard Havekost’s painting from the past ten years, focusing on work first exhibited at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2016/17. The work’s heterogeneity is evident in the selection of subjects, as well as the styles employed. This extreme range characterizes Havekost’s artistic work as a whole. The artist situates his paintings in complex interrelationships, where connections and relevancies are constantly reconfigured, forming a continuously growing web.

Lydia OkumuraSituations

For almost fifty years, Lydia Okumura has explored the realm of geometric abstraction. She challenges our perception of space through sculptures, installations, and works on paper that blur distinctions between dimensions.

Spaces of CommoningArtistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists. In the face of an exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, the group explores commoning as the subject as well as the means of its study.

Darja BajagićUnlimited Hate

For her first institutional solo Darja Bajagić turns to the murky terrain where real and staged violence bleed into each other with an ease both unsettling and alluring. This has been a key undercurrent to a practice that spans painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Following the lure of the fringes, the artist culls her imagery from fan-gore magazines, true-crime TV shows, fetish websites, obscure online forums, and hidden chat rooms tucked away in the darker reaches of the Web.

In our cultural imagination, the cosmos is a harmonious, utopian universe, but it is also uncontrollable, even unknown, and the source of a specifically modern fear or uneasiness—one that could be described as “cosmic anxiety.” This catalogue presents many possibilities for the artistic exploration of the topic at hand: the connection between artistic and scientific imagination, the cosmos as analysis of sci-fi culture, perspectives of corporeal immortality, and the critique of contemporary technology.

Martin HerbertTell Them I Said No

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York.

Hannah RickardsGrey light
Left and right back, high up, two small windows

Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows is a major new work by London-based artist Hannah Rickards commissioned by Fogo Island Arts.The publication features texts by Melissa Gronlund and Will Holder and striking new photographic imagery drawn from the installation’s physical materials and production process. Like Rickards’s work, the publication aims to bridge the distance between visual experience and its expression in language, whether spoken, written, or gestural.

Future Imperfect critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It offers historical contexts for discussions that have become increasingly urgent in recent years—the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization—and an in-depth critique of the state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty.

Nathalie Du PasquierBIG OBJECTS NOT ALWAYS SILENT

Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. It consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings, and a book with photographs by Delfino Sisto Legnani of works from the past decades. Texts by writers and artists and an interview with Du Pasquier provide an informative and subjective view of her artistic practice.

This publication focuses on the practice of curating in Southeast Asia, a region experiencing a time of increased global visibility as well as nation and institution building. The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems.

Addressing possible configurations of art and nature, Margit Busch, recipient of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2016, created a laboratory-cum-experiment that included mealworms and beetles that consume, and thus recycle, polystyrene plastic. By generating insights into the discipline of “transciency”—devoted to perspectives, research methods, and representations operating through and beyond science—Busch’s project sheds light on the meeting points of scientific, philosophical, artistic, and practical discourses.

Andrej PolukordThe Sarcophagus
Preis der Kunsthalle Wien 2016

Andrej Polukord, corecipient of the Kunsthalle Wien 2016 prize, draws on painting, installation, performance, and video art to create unpredictable environments and absurd situations that produce double meanings and ambiguity. Polukord installed The Sarcophagus at Kunsthalle Wien, an environment that takes the form of a cave. In this installation mushrooms grow from the ceiling of the Kunsthalle, transforming the gallery into the space of an inverted forest floor.

Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers, and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology, and how infrastructures are invented against its background. The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader; it juxtaposes documents, negotiations, and reflections from and on these conversations.

Monica RossEthical Actions
A Critical Fine Art Practice

British artist Monica Ross (1950–2013) left behind forty years of socially engaged, feminist, and performative artwork, which has had a deep effect on contemporary art and society. This fully illustrated publication documents Ross’s works from 1970 to 2013.

Boris GroysParticular Cases

This collection of essays does not aim to illustrate a prefabricated theory of art, but rather follows the impulses given by artworks themselves. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys writes about significant artists and artworks of the last century that have pushed his thinking and writing in a new direction. His striking and original arguments do not try to substitute the singular content or message of an artwork. Rather, the writings are inspired by art as a mind-changing practice—as if contemporary artists, completely secularized, can still produce a sort of conversion within the spectator.

Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane, Jumana Mannaars viva 2017

The ars viva Prize has been awarded annually since 1953 to young artists living in Germany whose work stands out for its innovative potential and high artistic quality. The recipients of this year’s prize are Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane, and Jumana Manna.

James RichardsRequests and Antisongs

Requests and Antisongs is an artist’s book to accompany a sequence of exhibitions by James Richards held at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. The book contains a series of visual essays by the artist, documentation of recent exhibitions, as well as essays by Dan Fox, Ed Atkins, Steve Reinke, Chris McCormack, and Fatima Hellberg.

Anastasiya YarovenkoPreis der Kunsthalle Wien 2015

Anastasiya Yarovenko, one of the two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, makes work concerned with the body’s relationship to societal structures, behaviors, and space. In her installation Mimicry at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, the Ukrainian-born artist assembled a selection of objects that don’t represent any definitive state but that possess the potential to interact with the viewer or surroundings. These objects consist of collapsible and modular furniture-like elements, as well as seemingly nonfunctional sculptures made of light materials

Karina MendreczkyPreis der Kunsthalle Wien 2015

With delicate lyricism, Karina Mendreczky creates fictional landscapes using light and shadow. As one of two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, she created the installation Thin Dream at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. Silhouettes of acrylic trees, whose details were hand-carved with an etching needle, were projected onto the back wall of the gallery to create the impression of actual large-format drawings.

Boy Vereecken (Ed.)Signature Strengths

The No-Frills book series was developed in the early 1980s as a translation of the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples to mass-market genre fiction. The result of research into this experimental series, Signature Strengths also includes complete reproductions of its books—Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator “contemporary art” refer to? An immediate response would be that contemporary art is an art of the present, that it somehow addresses and expresses the present. But what is this present? What constitutes the present present or the contemporary contemporary? This first book in the Contemporary Condition series introduces some of the key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present. It thus acts as an extended preface to the series as a whole, calling for a rethinking of the deep structures of temporalization that render our present the way it is.

The contemporary moment is comprised of many overlapping speeds, rhythms, and periods of time. A central theme of Jussi Parikka’s book concerns slowness instead of acceleration: a different sort of a temporal horizon in order to understand some of the environmental temporalities that media and technological arts are involved in. This is approached through art and design practices that unfold this multiplicity of time, closely entwined with contemporary concerns in aesthetic theory, to understand and engage with the planetary time scales of slow environmental violence.

Terry SmithThe Contemporary Composition

Can we speak of composition when we are in a state of unfathomable decomposition? Art being made today defies coherent categorization, and the world presents itself, day after day, as spinning into confused chaos, structural disintegration, and violent disorder. Revising his well-known histories of contemporary art, Terry Smith argues that we must respond to the compelling need for coeval composition at a time defined by the contemporaneity of divisive difference. This book traces how—despite many obstacles—visual artists across the globe are rising to this challenge.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan[inaudible]
A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts

A “politics of listening” is an intervention into and a reorganization of forms that listening takes rather than a call for free speech or for a platform for voices to be heard. Listening is a political act, a pedagogical process, and an activity that can lead to the development of an organized protocol for engagement. In his art and research, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores the perception of language, sound, and listening. National identity, human rights, and the administration of justice are recurrent themes in his work.

Gordon BennettBe Polite

Gordon Bennett: Be Polite follows the exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition and publication are the first to present the work of Bennett since his death. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and writing formed the foundation of his practice.

Nicholas ManganLimits to Growth

This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition “Limits to Growth.” The exhibition and book bring together four of Mangan’s most significant works of the past seven years, alongside a new commission. The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun.

Angela Bulloch, Maria ZerresConsidering Dynamics and the Forms of Chaos

This volume accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum—two parallel solo shows by Angela Bulloch and Maria Zerres brought together under one title, framed by the notion of entropy. A key term that characterizes the movement toward chaos, entropy appears in a variety of fields such as physics, probability theory, sociology and information technology. Within contemporary art, entropy has emerged to refer to installations often associated with representations of order, disorder and information, and their homogeneity.

Tirdad ZolghadrTraction

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others.

Jill MagidThe Proposal
Critical Spatial Practice 8

The eighth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series focuses on Jill Magid’s “The Barragán Archives,” a multiyear project that examines the legacy of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988), and questions forms of power, public access, and copyright that construct artistic legacy.

Keren CytterA–Z Life Coaching

An incomplete guide for life. Each person written about is represented by a letter, and when an object turns into a subject it is marked in bold.

This book was written from the middle. The contents of these pages have been modified numerous times. Notes were taken, ideas were rewritten—the ones that survived bare the most essential guidelines and wisdom for life

Shezad DawoodKalimpong

Kalimpong is an artist project in book form by the London-based artist Shezad Dawood. Set in Kalimpong at various moments from 1912 to the present day, Dawood’s project is part fact, part fiction. There are explorers and spies, poets and travelers, lovers and strangers, princesses and humanoids, all strangely connected across the globe through this curious Indian town.

Francis McKeeHow to Know What’s Really Happening

In this post-truth era, how does one navigate the endless information available and choose a viable narrative of reality? In How to Know What’s Really Happening Glasgow-based writer and curator Francis McKee looks at various techniques for determining verity, from those of spy agencies and whistle-blowers to mystics and scientists.

David HarveyAbstract from the Concrete

Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward—geographically and materially—Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again. The why emerges as a direct result of “anti-value,” of capital in crisis—intrinsic, he contends, to capital and capital cities today.

Irena HaidukSeductive Exacting Realism

A 13-volume set of Marcel Proust’s collected works was published in Yugoslavia in 1967. This edition, in the Latin alphabet, was highly valued by Yugoslav intelligentsia for its elegant translation from French by the poet Tin Ujević. During the Bosnian civil war, these Proust sets fetched up to the equivalent of a full year’s salary in the Belgrade black markets. They were frequently looted together with other valuables from Bosnian homes. The set exhibited in Irena Haiduk's “Seductive Exacting Realism” was seized by local police from Belgrade Kalenić Market in 1995. It was acquired at a public auction in 2014. It is missing volume number 12.

Ingo NiermannSolution 257
Complete Love

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love—no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are—communism will become real.

Michalis Pichler (Ed.)Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub

Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub spans an arc of tension between the works of Seth Siegelaub and contemporary cultural production. It features an interview with Seth Siegelaub, two essays by Regine Ehleiter and Michalis Pichler, and an extensively illustrated catalogue with bibliographic details.

Although the format of the rehearsal is used across a number of disciplines—film and theater as well as fine arts—it has been scarcely considered in historical and contemporary art discourses. With this in mind, Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic production.

What exactly is a behavioral object? How can it be analyzed, understood, theorized, experienced, and how can we conceive of works that possess the faculty of action and reaction to their environment and public? Examining three works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, this book tackles these questions and defines a new field of research and practice.

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz I Want

This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker, as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors. Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration.

While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown worldwide in relation to the pressing threats of climate change, global warming, and environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant and original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

From 2012 to 2016, Foreign Affairs, the international performing arts festival of Berliner Festspiele, and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) have been investigating the relations between the performing and visual arts. The festival has continuously produced projects with international artists that experiment with various institutional frameworks. This book is both a question and a manual, collecting ideas, knowledge and experiences that stem from the theory and practices developed over the past few years.

The Baltic Atlas

“It is impossible, but as you do not know it is impossible, it might be possible.”—Lolita Jablonskiene, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, commenting on previous attempts to organize a joint pavilion including all three Baltic States for the Venice Biennale

Kate CooperLOOK BOOK

Through her videos, exhibitions, and photographic works, Kate Cooper explores the role of gender and what agency images might possess in and of themselves. Producing images becomes akin to building infrastructure; her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. This publication accompanies the first institutional solo show by Cooper, winner of the 2014 Schering Stiftung Art Award. Cooper returns to the CGI female models used in her exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, to create a new series of works situated within the fictional space of the lookbook.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #11Summer 2016

Released to inaugurate The Serving Library’s new red, gold, and green space in Liverpool, this issue is both printed in and concerned with color. It includes Emily Gephart’s account of the Spectra Poetry Hoax of 1916, a truncated phone call from Dexter Sinister to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the late, great Muhammad Ali discussing skin color in a 1971 TV interview, reflections on the history of Chroma-key green by Lucas Benjamin, a personal history of paint and painting by Amy Sillman, and further contributions by T. E. White, Umberto Eco, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Tamara Shopsin, and James Langdon.

Lívia Páldi, Olav Westphalen (Eds.)Dysfunctional Comedy
A Reader

Dysfunctional Comedy documents a series of public events, performances, and workshops conceptualized by German-American artist Olav Westphalen and organized with different partners, mainly in Sweden, between 2012 and 2015. An intersection of practices, ideas, and images, this artist’s book/catalogue engages with representatives of different traditions and genres in comedic and cartoonist practices to reflect on the rich history of stand-up comedy and political satire.

Apple. An Introduction(Over and over and once again)

A supplement to exhibitions held at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, this book centers around the apple as an art object and as a case study in biodiver sity under threat. Developed over the course of an ongoing, five-year correspondence between artist Antje Majewski and the Polish conceptual artist Paweł Freisler, the project explores the idea of diversity in all of its possible meanings and manifestations, tying together collaborative and associatively connected works by Majewski and Agnieszka Polska, Freisler, Piotr Życieński, and Jimmie Durham in a museum exhibition dealing with the apple.

“New Ways of Doing Nothing,” a group exhibition that took place at Kunsthalle Wien in 2014, devoted itself to artistic production that opposes activity and instead gives an affirmative slant to forms of doing nothing or refraining—a major influence being the titular character of Hermann Melville’s “Bartleby the Scriviner: A Story of Wall Street.” The book presents the displayed works and artists, but also continues the process that led to the exhibition. Included along with a conversation between the curators is a text collage of reprints and excerpts that introduces those artists and thinkers who, in the words of Bartleby, “prefer not to.”

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do' architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them.”—Eyal Weizman

The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants and researchers.

Intersubjectivity, a two-volume collection of essays, is concerned with a new account of our ideas of what subjects are, and what it means for them to meet. The first volume, Language and Misunderstanding, addresses concretism and its discontents. The essays and performance texts herein argue for an expanded consideration of concretism in contemporary practices oriented toward the embodiment of language, in works that challenge the privileging of the body of the word over the body of the artist.

James Voorhies (Ed.)What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism?

New Institutionalism, a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s, evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann, the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, and other influential factors of the time. New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. These approaches posed other possibilities and futures for institutions and exhibitions, challenging the consensual conception, production, and distribution of art.

Florian Hecker
John McCracken

Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.

Fredrik VærslevAll Around Amateur

Fredrik Værslev’s work navigates between different painterly traditions, and demonstrates the possibilities and relevance of the medium today. He treats his paintings as objects, often created through more or less laborious, serial, or deterministic processes where time itself, as well as various external factors, become active cocreators in the making of the work. Published in conjunction with Værselv’s exhibition “All Around Amateur” at the Bergen Kunsthall and Le Consortium, Dijon, this publication comes in two different versions, with each book comprising 320 one-to-one digital images scanned from eight of Værslev’s new “sunset” paintings.

Helge Mooshammer, Peter MörtenböckVisual Cultures as Opportunity

In the fourth volume of the series Visual Cultures as..., Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck analyze the networked spaces of global informal markets, the cultural frontiers of speculative investments, and recent urban protests, and discuss crucial shifts in the process of collective articulation within today’s “crowd economy.”

Els Silvrants-Barclay, Pieternel Vermoortel (Eds.)Cave 1—Territories

Cave is a series of publications featuring commissioned and republished explorations, anecdotes, research, documents, case studies, essays, and scenarios on how to think and practice contemporary collecting. The first issue of Cave looks into the territory of the public collection considering it both a semantic ground for institutional collecting as well as political and cultural infrastructure.

John Douglas MillarBrutalist Readings
Essays on Literature

John Douglas Millar’s Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.

PresenceA Conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich

Recently, the idea of “presence” has returned to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In February 2013, in Zurich’s historical Cabaret Voltaire, which was central to the Dada movement almost a hundred years ago, an experimental international symposium took place that put presence under the microscope.

Jens Hoffmann (Ed.)United States of Latin America

This publication documents the exhibition “United States of Latin America,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in collaboration with the Kadist Art Foundation. Bringing together their shared and ongoing engagement with artistic practices from Latin America, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra have assembled one of the most significant contemporary survey’s of recent art from the region.

Simon Battisti, Leah Whitman-Salkin, Åbäke (Eds.)I Have Left You the Mountain

“I Have Left You the Mountain” presents ten new texts written by contemporary writers and thinkers on the architecture of displacement. These texts have been set to music and sung by some of the last remaining groups of Albanian iso-polyphonic singers, an art form now protected as “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.

Lara FavarettoAgeing Process

Ageing Process, Lara Favaretto’s first monograph, documents the artist’s works from the 1990s to her most recent installations presented in the 2015 exhibition “Good Luck!” at MAXXI in Rome. Structured like a manual, this volume accompanies entries on her works with essays by critics and experts from various disciplines who tackle themes complementary but not directly connected to the artist’s practice.

Charlemagne PalestineGesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandttttt

Charlemagne Palestine works from a highly personal universe of ritual, intoxication, and shamanism. Over the last four decades the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual artworks inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls “divinities.”

Josephine Meckseper10 minutes after

10 minutes after features installation views from Josephine Meckseper’s recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor, a gallery of “psychoimages,” and two newly commissioned texts. Independent curator and writer Piper Marshall considers ideas of détournement, the readymade, and base materialism in Meckseper’s oeuvre, while writer and editor Domenick Ammirati explores the significance of painting and text within Meckseper’s installations.

Ina BlomThe Autobiography of Video
The Life and Times of a Memory Technology

In her innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that video technology was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. She follows the reflexive unfolding of an analog technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. Blom documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration.

Susanne KriemannDuskdust

Duskdust is an artist book by Susanne Kriemann. It takes as its starting point the former industrial site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest island. It is informed by the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and archaeology and includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival material as well as text contributions by invited authors.

Olivia Plender Rise Early, Be Industrious

As the first significant overview of the work by artist Olivia Plender, this monograph navigates through the evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and education that her research-based practice has explored for the last ten years.

The globalized world seems at once transparent and opaque. The exhibition project “Transparencies” examined the cultural facets and atmospheres of these (non-)transparencies. The two-part, joint exhibition project in Bielefeld and Nuremberg was dedicated to developments in “transparent society,” asking how these are reflected in the current work by contemporary artists.

Hugo Boss Asia Art
Award for Emerging Asian Artists 2015

This substantial publication presents the shortlisted artists for the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists 2015, and the accompanying exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum. The art prize aims to put into practice and to question intra-Asia art connections, gaps, and combinations that build very active art scenes from specific contexts to ongoing extensions. In their work, the six finalists—Guan Xiao, Huang Po-Chih, Moe Satt, Maria Taniguchi, Vandy Rattana, and Yang Xinguang—reflect, build, and imagine new art scenes in such different contexts as Cambodia, Mainland China, Myanmar, Philippine, and Taiwan.

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

Annette Gilbert (Ed.)Publishing as Artistic Practice

What does it mean to publish today? In the face of a changing media landscape, institutional upheavals, and discursive shifts in the legal, artistic, and political fields, concepts of ownership, authorship, work, accessibility, and publicity are being renegotiated. How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice.

Wendelien van OldenborghAmateur

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories.

Frederick KieslerFunction Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality

This collection of unpublished or rare texts by Frederick Kiesler written between 1927 and 1957 focuses on Kiesler’s ideas on display, and juxtaposes works of contemporary artists with a number of original drawings by Kiesler.

Eva Grubinger Black Diamond Bay

Eva Grubinger’s exhibition explores the idea of psychological landscapes—a physical or mental journey—that evokes ideas of escapism and the search for the self. Released in conjunction with the show, this catalogue features visual documentation of the exhibition by Sylvain Deleu, and an accompanying text by Fatoş Üstek.

Nav Haq (Ed.)Syntax and Society
The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2016

This double publication offers further investigation into the work of the recipients and shortlisted artists of ninth installment of The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Syntax and Society, the first volume, reflects on the exhibition premise that considered the structure and meaning of language and the role it plays in society, with a focus on the work of the three shortlisted artists, Dina Danish, Mahmoud Khaled, and Basir Mahmood while the second volume, Oh Shining Star Testify, focuses on the work of award-winning artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Chen ZhenWithout going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized

This catalogue presents an art-historical angle on Chen Zhen’s unique way of questioning his experience of globalization through art. It includes documentation of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum (May 30–October 7, 2015), along with detailed sketches of both existing and unrealized projects.

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity.

Photographs, books, and knickknacks: artists collect a variety of objects. While artists generate personal collections, which often address different formal, aesthetic, or conceptual concerns, it is difficult to separate this activity from their artistic practices. Over time, whether intended or not, such accumulations of items may become works of art. Individual Stories considers the collection as a portrait of its collector and also as an artistic method—as a process rather than an end result. This catalogue is a compilation of individual collections that could not be more different.

This volume is a collection of dynamic and engaged writings by art historian John C. Welchman on a range of contemporary European artists: Vasco Araújo, Cosima von Bonin, Jan De Cock, Orshi Drozdik, Susan Hiller, Andy Hope 1930, Michael Kunze, Nathaniel Mellors, Miguel Palma, José Álvaro Perdices, Sascha Pohle, Thomas Raat, Nicola Stäglich, and Xavier Veil­han. Anchored in concerns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, Welchman poses thoughtful and provocative questions about how these artists receive and negotiate the social and aesthetic histories through which they live and work.

Shahryar NashatObituary

The subject of this book is a deceased prop, an object of a particular color, the green of cinematic trickery and special effects. It edged itself into Shahryar Nashat’s work in 2011, first appearing in Factor Green, an installation the artist produced for the Venice Biennale. Taking its final form a year later, the prop became properly known as La Shape. Accompanied by archival images and a series of portraits that Nashat made during La Shape’s most prolific years, Obituary is a gripping read into a most mysterious icon and a timely consideration of the roles played, and agency expressed, by such a highly mediated art object.

In the seventh volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the Viennese émigré architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance in a contemporary world saturated with visual information.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #10Winter 2015

This tenth volume is a “sampler” issue comprising one choice Bulletin from each of the previous nine. From now on, Bulletins of The Serving Library will proceed in full color and at half its former size (but will be twice as good).

Boris Ondreička, Nadim Samman (Eds.)Rare Earth

Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.

An experiment with alternative forms of design, Public Design Support is also an intervention in urban life. It helps local residents and others to shape their lifeworld and explore possibilities for action, instead of the usual experience of powerlessness and marginalization in the face of urban development. Public Design Support offers free practical help in dealing with everyday problems while also helping to develop alternative conceptions of the city. This publication—which includes key project materials, scholarly essays, and significant historical texts—chronicles the aspirations, methods, and projects of the first four years of Public Design Support.

Roee RosenThe Blind Merchant

An artist book juxtaposing text and image, history and its revision, The Blind Merchant was produced from 1989 to 1991. The work is composed of three elements: the complete text of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; a “parasitical” text written by Roee Rosen that runs alongside the play, adopting the perspective of the principal antagonist Shylock, the Jewish moneylender; and 145 drawings that present an alternative approach to the drama’s staging and casting of characters—Shylock is depicted as the blind merchant with drawings made by the artist while blindfolded.

Ull HohnForegrounds, Distances

Ull Hohn: Foregrounds, Distances aims not only to offer the first comprehensive overview of his work, but also to contribute to a history of painting-based practices, which occupy a marginal place in the established narratives of the art of the 1980s and 1990s

Suzana Milevska (Ed.)On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency

On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency prompts a unique crossdisciplinary inquiry into the productive potential of the affect of shame. This book contests the ontological understanding of shame and the psychoanalytical interpretation of it based on personal traumatic experiences linked to lack, loss, memory repression, and absence.

Olafur EliassonBaroque Baroque

As an accompaniment to the same-titled exhibition at the Belvedere’s Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna, the catalogue Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque examines some of the trajectories of thought raised by the encounter between Eliasson’s artworks and their temporary baroque housing: in particular, how transformations of space, perception, and cognition reflect the realms of politics, technology, and the Anthropocene.

Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture.

Tom BurrAnthology: Writings 1991–2015

Since the late 1980s, Tom Burr has been reusing appropriation strategies in his art. Not confined to his photographic and sculptural works, they also lend momentum to many of his writings. The artist creates assemblages of personal writings and sources, differing in nature and style, which he has used as both conceptual and aesthetic materials. Thirty-seven texts—works, poems, autobiographical texts, and portraits—have been compiled for the first time in this publication. Written over a period of twenty-four years, they are presented chronologically, enabling us to fully appreciate the conceptual and visual coherence and richness of Burr’s writings.

Dexter SinisterUniversal Serial Bus

What’s on a Universal Serial Bus? A collection of electronic works by Dexter Sinister produced from 2008 to 2015. Dexter Sinister is the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, who operate at the intersection of graphic design, publishing, and contemporary art. This memory stick is released parallel to the exhibition at Kunstverein München, “On a Universal Serial Bus.*”

Jos de Gruyter & Harald ThysFine Arts

Fine Arts continues Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. The artist duo became watercolorists for the project, harping back to an early amateur pictorial tradition while basing their picture making on a range of quotidian and historical images culled from the Internet.

Jos de Gruyter & Harald ThysDie Schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern

Part document, part photographic album, this book by artist duo Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys captures the sculptural revisionings of the descendants of an executioner family from Greifswald in Pomerania, a historical region on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. The “dirty puppets” are weary, the clothing worn in by history, their story line deadpan and fable-like.

Mierle Laderman UkelesSeven Work Ballets

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position she still holds that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure. This monograph focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of large-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables— which took place between 1983 and 2012 in Givors, New York, Pittsburgh, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi.

The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. Drawing on key texts by Sergei Eisenstein, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Donna Haraway, and analyzing works by Pierre Huyghe, Christoph Keller, and Helen Marten, this volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”

Keren Cytter, Nora SchultzTerminal

Terminal is an artist book conceived by Nora Schultz and Keren Cytter. Its title and logic follow Schultz’s latest performance, Terminal + at Tate Modern, London (2014), and the exhibition “I’m Honda” at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2015). Nora Schultz used Google’s image search on her own documentation to create an unexpected, ever-expanding narrative of digital associations. She then invited nine artists to contribute to this narrative.

Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of “queer abstraction,” a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire.

MetahavenBlack Transparency
The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance

Black transparency is an involuntary disclosure of secrets against a backdrop of systematic online surveillance, as large parts of contemporary life move into the digital realm. It has brought forward a new sense of unpredictability to international relations, and raises questions about the conscience of the whistleblower, whose personal politics are now instantly geopolitical. In their latest book, Metahaven embark on a journey of subversion while examining transparency’s intersections with design, architecture, and pop culture, as well as its ability to unravel the circuitry of modern state power.

Mario PfeiferApproximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear

Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear is Mario Pfeifer’s latest project, which he developed in Puerto Williams, the southernmost settlement in the world located on the southern archipelagos of Patagonia on Chile’s territory bordering Argentina. The publication documents his multiple-screen video installation and production process as well as his researches in archives of the Martin Gusinde estate at Anthropos Institut Sankt Augustin and in the ethnomusicology department of Berlin-Dahlem’s Museum of Ethnography.

Expanded from a touring exhibition originated at Para Site in 2013, this book critically analyzes historical and contemporary imaginations and politics of fear in the face of disease and the specter of contamination in society and culture. The contributions speak from a humanistic and global perspective, pointing to the intersections of urban environments and post-colonial psychology, popular culture and racism, public health and migration, national identity and art.

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil JoreigeThe Rumors of the World
Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet

This book traces the work and research of filmmakers and visual artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and their exploration through their work of online spam e-mails, specifically, advance-fee frauds and scam messages. The artists present material they have collected since 1999, focusing on the way that personal narratives are formed and articulated in a post-digital age.

Marcos LutyensMemoirs of a Hypnotist
100 Days

When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. He also didn’t know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document.

Tony ConradTwo Degrees of Separation / Über zwei Ecken

Tony Conrad, who can be described as an artist, composer, musician, filmmaker, and performer, might be considered the first true “crossover artist.” Two Degrees of Separation accompanies the eponymous exhibition by Tony Conrad at Kunsthalle Wien.

Irena HaidukSpells

Spells is the first collection of Irena Haiduk’s writing, gathering her texts and limited-edition publications since 2007. Moving through a wide range of formats, the book encompasses manifestos, music scores, forecasts, conversions, translations, architectural programs, and other difficult-to-categorize works. With sharp teeth and a killer instinct, Haiduk leads the way to a sunny spot where every soul suffers infinite injustice.

Michel Butor, Dan GrahamConversation

In the fall of 2013, Dan Graham and Mieko Meguro traveled with Donatien Grau to a town in the French Alps to meet Michel Butor, one of the foremost innovators of postwar literature. This is their conversation.

Ingo NiermannSolution 264–274
Drill Nation

Having furnished solutions for Germany and Dubai, Ingo Niermann takes a new look at what nationhood can mean and accomplish today, finding inspiration, of all places, in North Korea. Now that the promise of global prosperity and abundance can technically be fulfilled, the time has come for a minimalist rethink of society. By relying on drills and a principle of reduction, the individual can be granted a freedom for experiences and ideas that are not possible otherwise. The more we simplify, the lighter the ballast we’ll have to carry.

Alhena Katsof, Dana YahalomiSolution 263
Double Agent

The phenomenal performative relationship between the state and its cultural institutions was perhaps best exemplified when the declaration of the State of Israel was staged at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1948. This relationship has been at the heart of Public Movement’s research. Solution 263: Double Agent, authored by Alhena Katsof and Dana Yahalomi, presents a methodology, manual, and performance offered as a culmination of efforts by the Office of Strategy and Protocol. It contains the necessary tools to activate Debriefing Sessions and in doing so trains future Agents in a series of one-to-one exchanges gathered from work in the field.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #9Summer 2015

Issue number nine tackles all manner of sports and games, providing commentary on their language, politics, and philosophies. It kicks off with a discussion of New England Patriots controversial quarterback Tom Brady in view of ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 radio interview with UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson. In between, the issue slaloms around bodybuilding, bridge, ice hockey, tennis, darts, golf, reporting, running, drugs, rock climbing, basketball, and Pong.

Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.)Final Vocabulary

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015.

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe VassalFreedom of Use

Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal are known for an architecture that privileges inhabitants’ freedom and pleasure through generous, open designs. The Paris-based architects opened their 2015 lecture at Harvard University with a manifesto: study and create an inventory of the existing situation; densify without compressing individual space; promote user mobility, access, choice; and most importantly, never demolish. Freedom of Use reflects on these core values to present a fluid narrative of Lacaton and Vassal’s oeuvre, articulated through processes of accumulation, addition, and extension.

Eyal WeizmanThe Roundabout Revolutions
Critical Spatial Practice 6

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.

Dora GarcíaMad Marginal Cahier #4
I See Words, I Hear Voices

The fourth volume of the Mad Marginal Cahier series brings together essays by international authors that develop different threads pertaining to artist Dora García’s practice. In her research, she explores—through the figures of James Joyce and Robert Walser—deviant literature, exploded language, the unconscious, and the notion of exile as inherent to artistic practice.

Sarah EntwistlePlease send this book to my mother

In Please send this book to my mother, artist Sarah Entwistle dismantles the traditional form of the architectural monograph and artist biography. In 2011, the astounding personal effects of her grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle (1916–76), emerged from a Manhattan storeroom. This book welds together original text fragments and extensive visual material from the collection and Clive Entwistle’s years in Paris, London, Tangiers, and New York.

The Ausseerland and the partly inaccessible landscape in the Austrian Totes Gebirge look back on a checkered political history. A great number of activities both supporting and opposing Hitler’s fascism were focused there in the mid-1940s. The year 2015 sees the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Europe from Nazi totalitarianism. Only few witnesses of these past events are still alive at this time. Many events are known, many interpretations contested, but an encounter with contemporary art that focuses on historic sites in the landscape, and decides to interpret these sites differently, is unprecedented.

Peripheries are profoundly ambiguous regions. While trying to build a relationship with the center, the periphery often finds itself excluded both on a structural and actor-related level, no matter if the center-periphery model is defined in terms of space or along relations of power. The publication Art in the Periphery of the Center attempts to shift practices of thought toward both critical realism and new materialism. It is neither committed to today’s wishful thinking regarding horizontal networks and deterritorialized structures, nor does it fix itself to determinist approaches.

Published in conjunction with the eponymous installation at Art Basel 2015, DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY is an extension of the collaboration between artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, and chef Antto Melasniemi. This supplemental publication includes interviews, texts, images, and poems that illuminate the installation’s properties of self-sufficiency and how it was conceived as a new component of Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s ongoing project “the land,” a self-sustaining artistic community near Chiang Mai, Thailand. At the end of the festival, the structure will be transported to Thailand and will be the first building block of a new workshop on the land.

Vincent Fecteau

In 2005 Vincent Fecteau participated in a project in Los Angeles called “The Backroom,” in which artists were asked to contribute materials related to their research, sources, and interests. Using a large collection of magazine pages he had kept for inspiration, Fecteau arranged and rearranged them into formal and narrative relationships over the course of several months, and presented them in a simple black binder. This book is a reproduction of the resulting selection.

The Brancusi Effect begins with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Cited as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, the exhibition and publication collect Brancusi’s original photographic documentation. The installation reflects the recent currency of the sculptural within contemporary art while referencing Brancusi’s sensibility.

Two Days after Forever
A Reader on the Choreography of TimeChristodoulos Panayiotou
The Cyprus Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2015

Published on the occasion of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Two Days after Forever is not an exhibition catalogue, but rather an alternate temporal manifestation of the themes of the pavilion itself—in 2015, realized by artist Christodoulos Panayiotou and curated by Omar Kholeif. Adopting a variety of modes of address, this book acts as a kind of theater for considering the questions: How does one choreograph a history that is constantly being re-imagined? And, how do we speak of an anthropology of movement?

Filip Markiewicz Paradiso Lussemburgo

This publication continues, in the words of the artist, this “new contemporary mythology of Luxembourg,” with a bilingual layering of drawings, text and analysis, exhibition views, an interview, and a film script. Paradiso Lussemburgo, a project proposed by Markiewicz and curator Paul Ardenne, creates an active theater, which the reader continues and further opens for participation.

Mario Pfeifer, Kamran SadeghiApproximation

Kamran Sadeghi, New York-based musician and member of the Soundwalk Collective, contributed the musical score for Mario Pfeifer’s video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear (2014). For his digital compositions Sadeghi, in dialogue with Pfeifer, took the field recordings made by missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in 1923 of Yaghan chants in Bahia Mejillones as point of departure and reference.

Benjamin SerorMime Radio

Mime Radio was performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited into a novel. The story revolves around a cast of eccentric characters, who meet at the Tiki Coco, a bar in Los Angeles that holds “Challenging Reality Open Mic” nights for amateur inventors and performers.

Jaanus SammaNot Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale

Jaanus Samma’s exhibition “Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale,” conceived for the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, tells the story of the former collective farm chairman Juhan Ojaste (1921–1990), a war hero and family man, who was declared “not suitable for work.” He was found guilty after being subjected to humiliating criminal trials in the 1960s for his involvement in homosexual acts in Soviet Estonia. He lost his job and was abandoned by his family. After spending a year and a half in a corrective labor camp, Ojaste moved to Tartu where he became a local legend, notorious for his active gay life.

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications on the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond.

Jens HoffmannTheater of Exhibitions

Theater of Exhibitions analyzes “art after the end of art,” questioning whether inherited frameworks of making, theorizing, and exhibiting art still apply to contemporary practice. The book also considers the current commodification of the art industry and the distribution of images in the digital age. Drawing from his formation in theater and his own curatorial work, Jens Hoffmann reflects on the spaces of contemporary art—the gallery, the institution, the biennial—and ultimately positions the discipline of curating in the context of a larger cultural sphere shaped by the political, social, and economic conditions of its time, while demanding new attitudes and new thinking.

While the first volume Sculpture Unlimited (2011) dealt with the question of how the contemporary field of sculpture can be defined in a useful and stimulating manner against its long history, the second volume looks at the present and future. With sculpture as a leading reference, the contributions address theory, aesthetics, and technology: Do current philosophical movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology affect our notion of the art object? Does so-called post-Internet art have a future? And how does the Internet of Things relate to objects and things in art?

Flaka HalitiSpeculating on the Blue

Published in conjunction with Flaka Haliti’s solo presentation conceived for the Kosovo Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, this book continues the artist’s invitation to encounter a visual field in which territorial boundaries are referenced and mediated by the sensory. Through the use of a saturated blue color altered by light and demarcated by architectural forms, the installation at the Venice Biennale reflects on the salient concept of the border.

From 2008 to 2014 Sabine Folie was the director of the Generali Foundation—more than twenty-years after (plus que 20 ans après) the collection and exhibition venue formed in 1988. She helped establish the institution’s reputation for generating new critical discussion on contemporary art by revisiting modernism. This survey publication, richly illustrated with photographs and source materials, indexes and contextualizes the works acquired for this definitive collection during Folie’s tenure, along with giving insight into how the corresponding exhibitions were curated.

Ane Hjort Guttueating or opening a window or just walking dully along

On the occasion of Ane Hjort Guttu's 2015 Festival Artist exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, which presents the new commissioned film Time Passes (2015), this substantial monograph gathers reflections on recent projects and offers insight into the artist’s work and methodology.

Joseph Kellner (Ed.)Furniture of the Fogo Island Inn

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

Mathilde ter HeijnePerforming Change

Performing Change, a collection of interviews by artist Mathilde ter Heijne, explores the idea of open-ended, collaborative art processes and their transformative potential beyond the confines of art. Designed as an artist’s book, the book shows handwritten revisions, annotations, and drawings from contributors.

Armando LulajAlbanian Trilogy
A Series of Devious Stratagems

This catalogue-reader accompanies Armando Lulaj’s project for the 56th Venice Biennale. Curated by Marco Scotini, Lulaj’s exhibition in the Albanian Pavilion is a time capsule of the country’s past, presenting strange memorabilia and trophies that tread the line between fact and fiction. Combining evocation and documentation, Lulaj concentrates on a historic-political phase that was extremely important for building an identity that was not just Albanian but also international.

Pierre HerméThe Architecture of Taste

On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University from Paris. He brought five chefs, two assistants, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 32 pounds of cream, 25 pounds of milk chocolate couverture, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate “lecture de pâtisserie.” Together with Savinien Caracostea and Sanford Kwinter, he methodically deconstructed four conceptual desserts for 400 spectator-diners. The Architecture of Taste recaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé’s pastry visions.

e-flux journalThe Internet Does Not Exist

Today we live in a world that can be described as an “internet of things,” one that embraces digital technologies, and fulfills the dream worlds envisioned by twentieth-century writers, architects, and artists, such as Jack Burnham, Cedric Price, and Archigram. The internet is an ever-growing storage space of information that we have come to rely on—but what does this thing called the internet really mean? And does it still exist?

2015Mirjam Thomann

This artist’s book and monograph presents a broad selection of Mirjam Thomann’s work from 2006 to 2015. Along with spreads of 109 color images, 2015 Mirjam Thomann includes a preface by art historian and curator Eva Maria Stadler and a comprehensive essay on Thomann’s work by art historian, critic, and artist Tom Holert.

Rike Frank, Grant Watson (Eds.)Textiles
Open Letter

Textiles: Open Letter examines the referential and analytical qualities of textiles through both contemporary and historical works. The contributions in this book reflect on the complex interplay between the various functions and connotations of textiles—such as the emphasis on their tactile qualities or the artistic value attributed to them—and the attendant conflicts and antagonisms that articulate relations of power and value and of the interaction of artistic processes with their overarching contexts.

Gabriel LesterForced Perspectives

In this book Gabriel Lester’s prolific adventures and art practice are illustrated through an alphabetical assortment of his most prominent installations, interventions, sculptures, and films of the past fifteen years. Alongside comprehensive exhibition documentation, the actual construction and installation of the artworks is presented.

Inke Arns (Ed.)World of Matter

World of Matter is an international research project investigating primary materials and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. In addition to the project’s online platform and exhibitions, the book contains essays and visual contributions that present aesthetic and ethical approaches to the handling of resources, while challenging the assumption of late capitalism that the planet’s materials are primarily for human consumption.

Jutta Koetherf.

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red.

Artist NovelsThe Book Lovers Publication

This publication is devoted to the phenomenon of the artist novel, and whether it can be considered to be a medium in its own right within the visual arts. Thanks to the contributions of a selected group of artists, writers, curators, and scholars this publication strives to demonstrate that literature, when treated by visual artists, can take place well beyond the space of the book.

Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible EncountersAi Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York

“Taiping Tianguo,” a touring exhibition organized by Para Site, Hong Kong, began as a series of questions, including: How did Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong—four artists of Chinese heritage hailing from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and San Francisco, respectively— all end up in New York in the heady 1980s? With glimpses of the artists’ overlapping experiences, networks, and friendships, this catalogue makes a unique contribution to a critical reading not only of art of that time and place, but also of nascent contemporary Chinese art in the advent of the globalization of the art world.

Yto BarradaBefore History
The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015

Before History catalogues the exhibition for the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015, which includes a new body of work by Yto Barrada, the winner of the prize, and existing work by shortlisted artists Sarnath Banerjee, Setareh Shahbazi, and Mounira Al Solh. The exhibition explores the layering of time through historical artifice. History here is considered as a constructed sphere, constantly in flux, simultaneously being buried and excavated.

Amar KanwarThe Sovereign Forest

The Sovereign Forest attempts to reopen discussion and initiate a creative response to our understanding of crime, politics, human rights, and ecology. The validity of poetry as evidence in a trial; the discourse on seeing, on understanding, on compassion, on issues of justice; sovereignty and the determination of the self—all come together in a constellation of moving and still images, texts, books, pamphlets, albums, music, objects, seeds, events, and processes.

Olaf Holzapfeldie Technik des Landes
(The Technology of the Land)

Olaf Holzapfel’s exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, on occasion of being awarded the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize 2014, explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue—framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book—was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.

The publication brings together extensive material from Hamlet, mise-en-scène presented at Portikus, along with recently restored as well as never-published stills, drawings, and writings by American filmmaker and artist Jack Smith, related to his film Hamlet in the Rented World (A Fragment) (1970–73).

This book is the result of intellectual and physical journeys that artists, scholars, teachers, and students from China and Germany have undertaken together, in order to gain a better understanding of the connections between old Chinese philosophy (with an emphasis on Daoist writings), traditional Chinese painting, and contemporary art practices. The texts collected here give an introduction into concepts that are more than 2000 years old, yet still raise relevant questions about our current relationship to nature—both to nature in the sense of environment and ecology, and to our inner nature and its connection to the world we live in.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #8Winter 2014

This issue is smaller than large and larger than small: *medium*. Produced under the auspices of the exhibition “Transmitting Andy Warhol” at Tate Liverpool, it includes a history of the relations between drugs and groups by Ian Svenonius, an e-mail exchange between Paul Elliman and pioneer of voice synthesis Richard T. Gagnon, and a collage of voices that conjure Warhol’s aura by Michael Bracewell. With further contributions by Elie Apache, Stuart Bailey, Eli Diner, Emily Gephart, Lucy Mulroney, Larissa Harris, and Joe Scanlan.

Lou Cantor, Clemens Jahn (Eds.)Turning Inward

Turning Inward comprises a selection of texts by international artists, critics, and curators, which aims to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries in contemporary art worlds. In the context of advanced globalization, the distributed agency of networked power structures can hardly be localized any longer in geographical terms. Yet, if we are to turn our attention away from geographical—that is, horizontal—relations, we can conceive of the central and peripheral as vertical phenomena that can coexist spatially in the shapes of social constructions, genealogies, or epistemic formations.

João Ribas (Ed.)In the Holocene

In the Holocene is based on a 2012 group exhibition of the same name at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explored art as a speculative science, investigating principles more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought. Through the work of an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition and book propose that art acts as an investigative and experimental form of inquiry, addressing or amending what is explained through traditional scientific or mathematical means: entropy, matter, time (cosmic, geological), energy, topology, mimicry, perception, consciousness, et cetera.

K. D.Headless

“K. D. has created a masterwork of metaphysical detective fiction. Headless is a coded, clandestine novel that nevertheless makes for breathless reading until the last page.”Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, artist

Nicole Brenez“We Support Everything since the Dawn of Time That Has Struggled and Still Struggles”
Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

The Lettrist movement is unique in the history of avant-garde formations. Founded by Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, it remains active to this day, having lost none of its radicalism, either aesthetic or ethical. In this book, Nicole Brenez presents the key figures and the basic concepts of Lettrist cinema, the art form within which their formal innovations proved the most far-reaching, prefiguring the breakthroughs of the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema.

Mikkel Bolt RasmussenPlaymates and Playboys at a Higher Level
J. V. Martin and the Situationist International

After the infamous split in the Situationist International in 1962, the Danish artist J. V. Martin was unexpectedly put in charge of the group’s Scandinavian section. This book is the first presentation of Martin’s strange trajectory within the SI, in which he would remain a member until the group’s dissolution in 1972.

F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa The Futurist Cookbook
On the Table IV

In 1932, F. T. Marinetti and his collaborator Fillìa published The Futurist Cookbook, a manifesto-as-culinary-innovation. Replete with experimental recipes (the founder of Futurism, Marinetti, is known to have ranted about the social dangers of pasta eating), the book is a multilayered exploration of cultural metabolisms, with the dining table as its centerpiece, of course!

This publication examines the impact of Oskar Hansen within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. The book includes in-depth interviews with some of the most important protagonists of experimental art in Poland, who investigate the historical impact of the open form.

Noon on the MoonPoetic Series #4

The fourth issue in the “Poetic Series” is a seasonally themed special issue, a festive anthology composed of contributions from more than twenty writers and artists. Each interpreting the theme in an unconventional and abstract sense, it is an alternative omnibus of everyone's favorite and most controversial holiday. Noon on the Moon's title comes from a poem by Barry Schwabsky, featured alongside poetry by Charles Bernstein, Judith Goldman and Dorothea Lasky, prose by Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Andreas Schlaegel and Sarah Wang, amongst others. Artwork is provided in the form of a colorful collection of romance covers illustrated by Vicki Khuzami.

Renate Lorenz (Ed.)Not Now! Now!
Chronopolitics, Art & Research

Not Now! Now! engages with the politics of time in art: historical narratives and memory, the unforeseen rhythms of time, and the challenge of visualizing time. The book connects the postcolonial and queer debate around chronopolitics with artistic strategies that introduce breaks, stutter time, use citations and anachronisms, and introduce deferrals and collapses between time and meaning.

Stephanie KlossWeltausstellung

Stephanie Kloss’s photographs capture the mythos and utopianism of architecture in locations as diverse as Athens, Berlin, the United States, and Japan. Yet it is the commonality of modernist architectural form rather than the peculiarities of place, nation, or time that attracts her lens. In Weltausstellung, visual anonymity is the main event—but not the whole story. Embedded in Kloss’s photographs, as the absorbing essays in this catalogue reveal, are invisible histories of human enterprise, idealism, and trauma.

Felix Ensslin, Charlotte Klink (Eds.)Aesthetics of the Flesh

Word becomes flesh, God becomes pigment, beauty becomes empirical form, power negotiates itself in matter—and vice versa: these are some of the connotations carried by the aesthetics of the flesh. This reader traces the aesthetic concept of flesh in four sections: “Cut Power Matter,” “Form Cannibalism,” “Flesh Skin Surface,” and “Word Flesh Thought.” From perspectives as diverse as art history, religion, psychoanalysis, psychology, materialist philosophy, phenomenology, surgery, film studies, and literary studies, the articles present this concept, while at the same time showing how it surpasses the attempts to systematize or define it.

Jos de Gruyter & Harald ThysDas Wunder des Lebens

Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system. Juxtapositions are normalized, and normality becomes a farce.

Carsten HöllerLeben

A catalogue as puzzling and conceptually elaborate as the exhibition it accompanies. This fully circular publication has no beginning or end, allowing for multiple points of entry and unconventional ways of reading--both from left to right and vice versa, as well as upside down and right-side up--seeking to interrupt learned behaviors and soliciting the reader's active engagement.

Kevin SchmidtEDM House

This fourth publication in the series with Fogo Island Arts includes stunning color photographs of Kevin Schmidt’s installation and film EDM House (2013) plus reflections on Schmidt’s practice from leading writers.

Michael TedjaAquaholism

Michael Tedja’s Aquaholism is an exhibition catalogue, a published oeuvre, an artistic treatise, a poetry collection, a visual essay, an artist’s book. It is a polyphonic collage of text and image. More than seventeen years of artistic output unfold between the first and last pages. With its thoroughness, density, and associative power, the book embodies Tedja’s artistic essence: voluminous, interrelated, and in continuous motion.

Manfred HermesHystericizing Germany
Fassbinder, Alexanderplatz

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-part Berlin Alexanderplatz, broadcast on German television in 1980, is a pivotal work in the artist’s oeuvre. In this work, along with others from the same period, Fassbinder established a Jewish-German mirror rotating on the axis of the Holocaust. In Hystericizing Germany, Manfred Hermes provides an excursive analysis of the potential of narration within the paradoxes of cinematic representation, with Fassbinder’s miniseries forming both beginning and end point.

Ilit AzoulayFinally Without End

Finally Without End features Ilit Azoulay’s meticulously composed photographs, and includes work from the series “Implicit Manifestations,” created during a six-month residency at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

Jenni TischerPin

Pin is published on the occasion of Jenni Tischer’s eponymous exhibition at mumok in Vienna. As this publication vividly captures, her work weaves an unlikely bond between minimalist sculpture and the frayed, human history of textile work.

Gerry BibbyThe Drumhead

Artist Gerry Bibby’s first publication is a work of fiction that expands on the use of text in his sculpture, performance, and image work. Evoking William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys and Robert Walser’s The Walk, these “language costumes” pay homage to an unruly tradition of radical and queer literary presences over the last century. Their captivating passages brim with wit, wry observation, and (occasional) disgust, offering viewers “ways out,” even if only while reading.

Piper Marshall (Ed.)Descartes’ Daughter

Descartes’ Daughter, edited by Piper Marshall, former curator of the Swiss Institute in New York, documents the critically lauded 2013 exhibition of the same name as well as continuing its ideas. Taking the historical account of philosopher René Descartes’ creation of an animatronic effigy of his deceased young daughter as its foundation, the exhibition explored the traditional divide between conceptual and expressive works, those dealing with either the mind or the body.

Paul SietsemaAt the hour of tea

At the hour of tea is a collection of stills from Paul Sietsema’s most recent 16 mm film of the same title. A filmic space develops within pages of the book, moving through and layering the film’s imagery—tableaux of objects—via a system of cut portals and transparent screenlike pages.

Dominic Eichler, Brigitte Oetker (Eds.)PS:
Jahresring 61

The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality.

An explosion of interest in narrative practices at the end of the twentieth century has been referred to as the "narrative turn." Postmodernism itself was described as a narrative turn in which a rekindled interest in the fictive, the chronicle, and the anecdotal upstaged the symbolic unity of high modernism. Rather than opposing a myriad of micro-narratives to the grand narrative of modernism, The Reluctant Narrator attempts to map the migration of narrative modes across several media, bringing together works that intertwine personal biography with historical events, or that deal with stories that fell through the crevices of history.

Josef BauerWerke 1965–Heute
Works 1965–Today

Works 1965–Today stems from a retrospective held at the Grazer Kunstverein showcasing Josef Bauer’s experiments with language, color, and their spatial contexts nearly forty years after his last exhibition in Graz. His practice combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colors as mere “carriers” of meaning.

Leander SchönwegerDie Nebel lichten sich

A deserted campsite, a car with no one inside … Is anybody home? What has happened here? Evolving from his graduation project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna entitled The Creator Has a Master Plan, which was awarded the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2014, Leander Schönweger developed an installation at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz that indicates mysteries, rather than offers solutions. “The fog disperses” (as the title translates) into questions about the unusual exhibited situation rather than its origin.

Mark von SchlegellIckles, Etc.
Critical Spatial Practice 5

Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s. In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical sci-fi stories written for various exhibitions, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET.

Maria Lind, What, How & for Whom/WHW (Eds.)Art and the F Word
Reflections on the Browning of Europe

From 2012 to 2014 a series of contemporary art exhibitions, events, and participatory forums organized by Galerija Nova, Tensta konsthall, and Grazer Kunstverein comprised the project “Beginning as Well as We Can (How Do We Talk about Fascism?).” Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—the project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.

Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance aims to map the exchanges and transgressions between art and dance that characterize the manifold variety of relations between art and dance that can be observed today: dance performances taking place in art galleries or public spaces, for example, or visual artists developing specific presentational formats or exhibition displays that generate dimensions of dramaturgy and choreography for their visitors.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #7Summer 2014

This issue concerns itself with “numbers,” ranging from a brief note on “The Psychology of Number” by John Dewey and John McLellan, to Vincenzo Latronico’s historical overview of the ongoing attempt to conjure “truths from thin air” (such as proof of the existence of god).

Isa GenzkenI'm Isa Genzken, the Only Female Fool

“The Only Female Fool” is how Isa Genzken describes herself in the self-chosen title of her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien. This statement is typical of the fluid boundaries between deep seriousness and the exuberant, eccentric spirit that pervades her work.

Krüger & PardellerAESTHETIC BASIC CHRONICLE, VOL. 1

This publication is a work of both art and theory, and aligns itself with a socially activated, political understanding of aesthetics. A concept of production emerges—in the words of Krüger & Pardeller, “concrete openness.” The artist duo offers the readers and authors the precise aesthetic space of experience that constitutes their artistic practice.

Liz Magic LaserPublic Relations / Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

Liz Magic Laser’s performances and videos intervene in semipublic spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters, and newsrooms. Published on the occasion of her eponymous exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, this book focuses on her recent work examining the techniques of news production and the studied gestures of politicians.

Ines LechleitnerThe Imagines

The Imagines is based on the texts of four writers that each engage with a recent project by Ines Lechleitner. In response to each critical contribution, Lechleitner develops a visual section where elements and fragments of the selected projects build up their own narrative in relation to the specific space of this book.

Thomas Thiel (Ed.)Museum Off Museum

“Museum Off Museum,” the two-part exhibition at Bielefelder Kunstverein, explored the concept of the museum from an artistic and outside perspective. This book documents each of the exhibition phases, investigating the subjective potential of museum-based narratives and the current interest among artists in the “museum” as a space of reflection within global circumstances.

In this monograph the Swiss and Danish duo give us a deeper look into the emblematic and enigmatic, imaginative and often humorous works that the artists are known for. Bling blang, ching chang, give me some of that yin yang is the first survey of Yarisal & Kublitz’s works from 2010 to 2014.

Pauline Boudry/Renate LorenzAftershow

As an artists' book, Aftershow engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists’ investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

Eva GrubingerCafé Nihilismus

A rapid development of technology and science, a resultant feeling that reality is speeding up and even out of control: the mood and texture of our current moment strongly resemble those of a century ago. In Eva Grubinger’s exhibition “Café Nihilismus,” the two eras interweave. This slender catalogue simply and beautifully documents Grubinger’s 2014 exhibition at Kerstin Engholm Gallery in Vienna.

Michael SchindhelmSolution 262
Lavapolis

The tenth speculation in the Solution series imagines a possible European present and future.

Seventy years ago, the small island nation of Lavapolis was founded. It began as an alternative, a gambling destination to rival Las Vegas, and became a model for a new way of living. With its principle of universal solidarity, the nation counters the pitfalls of contemporary global society. It is an ever-shifting utopia; a volcano jutting out of the Mediterranean Sea; an extension of the open frontier. The biographies of its inhabitants are integral to the whole. If the world backs down from the challenges of Lavapolis, the island is destined to erupt.

This publication presents artist Katja Eydel’s photographic body of work. The individual projects focus on different environments that are often characterized by crisis—mostly dealing with communities and their fringes, with proxies and symbolic representations, as manifested, for example, in forms of protest or religious garments.

Focusing on time instead of the typically predominant category of space, this publication—the second volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial series—takes up the key aesthetic, social, political, and economic issues of the early twenty-first century running through the field and framed by the axes of exhibiting and the temporal.

Lisa OppenheimWorks 2003–2013

Over the past decade, artist Lisa Oppenheim has steadily developed a unique body of work exploring the usage of (historical) imagery. Balanced between appropriation and reconstruction, her work relies on substitutions applied to photographic and filmic records through which the historical and the present are transmitted and constituted through a language of today.

Cluster is a network of eight contemporary visual arts organizations each located in on the peripheries of European cities. Each organization is focused on commissioning, producing, and presenting contemporary art, and the nature of the work is often experimental, process-driven, involves research, is based on working with international and local artists, and often engages with diverse publics on a local level. Compiled over a period of two years, Cluster: Dialectionary aims to find new ways to position this work and the work of contemporary visual arts organizations more broadly, particularly in relation to wider social, political, and cultural concerns.

Florian ZeyfangSlow Narration Moving Still

Slow Narration Moving Still takes Florian Zeyfang’s eponymous exhibition at the Bildmuseet Umeå as its starting point and ends with the artist’s newest works, shown at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The arrested film, the silent video still, the rhythm of the slide projector—along the lines laid out by the experimental film, Zeyfang’s works express, in the language of the “minor medium,” a politics of form.

While the exhibition “The Crime Was Almost Perfect” at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam functioned more as a “space for experimentation,” this publication aims to investigate not only detective fiction but the more theoretical, philosophical, and aesthetic aspects of the genre. Published following the closing of the exhibition, this catalogue should be considered a continuation of the project, as a resource in itself, rather than simply documentation or commentary.

A symbolic interruption of everyday life, Two Minutes of Standstill was a political act, a social sculpture, and a collective performance. This catalogue is a documentation of Yael Bartana’s work, revealing the ideas behind it and the process that led to its realization. The book includes several essays that discuss possible interpretations and consequences of the artwork, questioning the role of history and commemoration in Germany today.

Fear of LanguagePoetic Series #3

The third issue in the Poetic Series takes its title Fear of Language from the work of emerging Slovenian poet Katja Perat, featured alongside poetry by Judith Goldman and excerpts from Eileen Myles’s forthcoming memoir, Afterglow. Artwork is provided by Willem de Rooij, whose series comprises collected images from the Internet displaying the aftermaths of destroyed and looted cultural heritage sites in conflict zones such as Iraq, Mali, Egypt, Syria, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Hu FangDear Navigator

Hu Fang’s Dear Navigator is a collection of ten short stories that takes us on a journey across time and space. Performance artists, astronauts, an airplane, Zen masters, and hunger artists are some of the companions of this exploration into hidden realities. Hu draws on the experience of everyday life, the past, and the future to create otherworldly stories where reality turns into fiction and science fiction becomes reality.

Ulrike GrossarthWäre ich von Stoff, ich würde mich färben /
Were I Made of Matter, I Would Color

This book is published on occasion of Ulrike Grossarth’s eponymous retrospective at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Both the book and the exhibition trace the evolution of Gossarth’s practice, with a particular emphasis on her training as a dancer in the 1970s, to draw connections between the early years with her sculptural settings and actions and her most recent work, which engages with history more generally.

Michel AuderStories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder

Since his arrival in New York in 1969, the French artist Michel Auder has authored more than five hundred video works that chart five decades of the medium’s history. Employing new video formats as they become available, many of which have quickly fallen into obsolescence, Auder has prolifically produced short and feature films as well as video installations and photography that transgress genres, gleaning the fields of art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema. At once poetic and critical, cruel and confessional, Auder’s casually virtuosic oeuvre continues to disrupt traditional perceptual habits of moviegoers and art audiences alike, subverting notions of filmic narrative and process.

Tone Hansen, Marit Paasche (Eds.)We Are Living on a Star

We Are Living on a Star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in a government building known in Oslo until July 22, 2011. The events of July 22 transformed normality as we knew it and, consequently, the predictable as well. The normal was no longer familiar, and the abnormal was no longer associated with the foreign. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star (the book and the exhibition it accompanies) contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression. The result is an open and inquiring look at our own time.

One of the few things we have in common in contemporary society is the future of our children. But it seems that even the “we” of childhood, of learning and free play, has turned into a common ground for instrumentalization and competition. What happened to the reform pedagogy of the twentieth century? What is the status of childhood in the era of the consuming child and the playing adult? These are some of the questions addressed by The Phantom of Liberty, which sets out to reestablish a social and aesthetic dialogue between visual art and psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, and critical journalism.

Ken Okiishi, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Alise Upitis The Very Quick of the Word

Ken Okiishi’s artwork has explored the subject in between digital and continuous space, the changing nature of authorship, memory, and perception, and the indeterminacy of consciousness as it clashes with the strictures of technology. He has engaged seminal works by figures including Woody Allen, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Stephen Spielberg, David Wojnarowicz, Jacques Demy, and Larry Clark (and the histories and personalities that circulate around these cultural products), infusing them with autobiographical and technological elements that reframe them through the incongruity of “real life.”This book is the first instance of considering Okiishi’s work from the last fifteen years as a heterogeneous whole.

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools. This anthology is a collection of twenty-one essays and conversations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine arts.

In 2010/11, a group of Vienna-based art practitioners (artists, art historians, and cultural theorists) embarked on a journey of experimental research, exploring the genealogical and political implications of the ways in which research rhetorics and policies are currently incorporated into the fields of contemporary art and art education. This collection of “books” of essays and conversations is the quirky and exhilarating outcome of the collaborative endeavor to interrogate the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation.

Roee RosenMaxim Komar-Myshkin: Vladimir’s Night

Vladimir's Night is the chimerical final work by Maxim Komar-Myshkin, one of the most elusive and tragic figures in Israeli-Russian art. Part children’s book, part gory political assault and part erotic farce involving elaborately detailed paintings that draw from the most disparate sources, the work is not only Komar-Myshkin's magnum opus, but an instrument of psycho-aesthetic retaliation against Vladimir Putin, whom the artist believed had a personal vendetta against him. Komar-Myshkin committed suicide in 2011, soon after completing the album.

Chantal Pontbriand (Ed.) Per/Form
How to Do Things with[out] Words

Performativity explores the in-between space when bodies or objects are left to perform. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatization (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics—these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making. Per/Form investigates the process of this enhancement—how to work through form, and how to let form speak for itself.

Victor BurginFive Pieces for Projection

Victor Burgin’s Five Pieces for Projection introduces recent projection work from 2010 to 2014, and coincides with the artist and writer’s retrospective exhibition “Forms of Telling” at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.

Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics takes the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and looks for direct action and concrete knowledge: for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that not only acts for the sake of acting but searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.

Keller EasterlingSubtraction
Critical Spatial Practice 4

Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets. However, when failing, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry.

Silke Otto-KnappQuestions of Travel

This book is published on occasion of the parallel exhibitions Silke Otto-Knapp presented in two markedly different locations: on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and at the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna. The contrasting influences of place—between rural and urban, new and old world—is evident in the selection of works presented and compiled in this catalogue.

J. Parker ValentineFiction

This artist book includes a selection of images—a documentation of exhibited works and those in process—that offer a sense of Valentine’s approach to working, which gestures toward abstraction and improvisation. For this book, many images have been adapted, reoriented, and/or manipulated. Also included are three essays that investigate Valentine’s process, considering work that has emerged from her previous projects, residencies, and exhibitions to date.

e-flux journal
Jalal TouficForthcoming
Second edition

“Although sometimes couched in what looks like the language of critical theory, Toufic’s formal hybridity and poetic methods sharply distinguish Forthcoming from most other titles on those shelves labeled Cultural, Poststructuralist, or Postcolonial Studies.… In his insistence upon treating the dead as a great part of the potential force of this world, Toufic plumbs the poetics of disaster and recuperation in ways that remain both incredibly suggestive and relentlessly radical.”—Village Voice Literary Supplement, April 2001

Peacocks with HiccupsPoetic Series #2

The second issue in the Poetic Series takes its title Peacocks with Hiccups from the poetry of Berlin-based artist Karl Holmqvist, whose work is featured alongside American poet Catherine Wagner and emerging Spanish writer Luna Miguel. Artwork is provided by Koo Jeong-A, whose simple line drawings were chosen from a series titled “Dr. Vogt.” Koo Jeong-A walks personal and cultural grounds to record relationships and comical encounters within landscapes and interiors.

Hito SteyerlToo Much World
The Films of Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is rightly considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Armen Avanessian, Andreas TöpferSpeculative Drawing: 2011–2014

Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books—from monographs and translations to collections of essays—that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011. This book gives a somewhat different introduction to contemporary speculative philosophy, raising questions on how thinking works and how thinking occurs in drawings or illustrations. How does a poetic thinking work that's not about but with art?

ForensisThe Architecture of Public Truth

This book excavates the notion of forensis (Latin for “pertaining to the forum”) to designate the role of material forensics in articulating new notions of public truth. The condition of forensis is one in which aesthetic practices, new technologies, and architectural research methodologies bear upon the legal implications of political struggle, violent conflict, and climate change.

Ion GrigorescuDiaries 1970–1975

Ion Grigorescu’s diaries from the crucial years of 1970 to 1975 are a small literary and art-historical sensation. It not only corrects the facile reading of Grigorescu’s practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance, but provides insight into the artist’s multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, an analysis of subjectivity, and a penetrating gaze into a dialectic of secrecy and elucidation, of exposure and mystification.

Brian O’DohertyThe Crossdresser’s Secret

The eighteenth century was an era of violent contrasts and radical change, intellectual brilliance and war, spies and diplomatic intrigue, elegance and cruelty. One of the century’s most mysterious figures was the Chevalier d’Eon, who lived as both man and woman, French spy and European celebrity. Written from the perspective of this historical figure, the novel by Brian O’Doherty reveals d’Eon’s radical modernity, certified by his attitudes to gender and his examination of his own nature.

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #6 Winter 2013

This issue poses as a retroactive non-catalog for the group exhibition “White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart” at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania curated by Anthony Elms. As such, its nominal theme is Fashion.

Objects in This Mirror posits a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates such diverse subjects as the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of cravat-tying manuals and the search for a cure to the common cold. Staying true to the idea of the essay as a self-aware but generous literary and critical form, this book explores the variety of topics it has been possible in recent years to corral within the rubric of art writing or criticism.

Kim GordonIs It My Body?
Selected Texts

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham.

Martin HerbertThe Uncertainty Principle

Martin Herbert’s The Uncertainty Principle is a collection of essays that reveals layers of unknowing and open-endedness within a diversity of contemporary art practices since the 1970s.

Nina CanellStray Warmings

Testing the intimate intersection of audience, object, and event, Nina Canell’s work has been described as “tethered to fragmented and often partially withheld narratives [and] comprised of choreographed indirection and relay.” Published in relation to the exhibition “Stray Warmings” at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, this new monograph documents the broader framework that has defined the artist’s practice, considering how intuition, corners, and a stratification of the transparent have formed Canell’s understanding of sculpture and its dissolution.

Jan VerwoertCOOKIE!

This new volume brings together a selection of Jan Verwoert's most recent writings. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

Melissa GordonMaterial Evidence

Material Evidence expands on the formal concerns and critical debates developed through Melissa Gordon’s exhibition of the same name, following a joint residency with Spike Island and Spike Island Print Studio in Bristol, in the summer of 2013.

Model House Research Group (Ed.)Transcultural Modernisms

Based on the findings of an interdisciplinary research project, Transcultural Modernisms maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an architectural modernity manifested in various ways in housing projects in India, Israel, Morocco, and China.

The work presented in this book is an invitation to undertake an urgent architectural and political thought experiment: to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization; consequently, to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from that of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee.

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting, and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture.

Peter WächtlerCome On

At a moment when narrating experiences seems more important than having them, Peter Wächtler’s writing foregrounds different narrative techniques and traditions as means of rationalizing one’s place in the world, of grappling with and giving meaning to one’s existence. Here, the social totality creeps into the picture. Come On compiles ten texts written between 2011 and 2013.

Haegue YangDare to Count Phonemes and Graphemes

This catalogue accompanies two parallel solo exhibitions by Haegue Yang held in the fall of 2013: “Journal of Bouba/kiki” at Glasgow Sculpture Studios (October 5–December 20, 2013); and “Journal of Echomimetic Motions” at Bergen Kunsthall (October 18–December 22, 2013). This new collaborative publication, Dare to Count Phonemes and Graphemes, has evolved within the framework of these geographically separate yet collaboratively conceived exhibitions.

Jakob Schillinger (Ed.)The Sixth Year

Set in the New York art world, The Sixth Year reinterprets the format of a TV series. In five episodes, a fictionalized narrative stages the backstage and theatricalizes the social interactions and power games, the aspirations, passions, and everyday realities of the field.

The Space Age consists of seven fold-out posters and a text by Martin Herbert. The publication coincides with the exhibition at M – Museum Leuven which encompasses fourteen years of Mir’s career (1999–2013).

Ion GrigorescuOmul cu o singur camer / The Man with a Single Camera

The Man with a Single Camera provides an extraordinary overview of Ion Grigorescu’s body of work since the late 1960s until today. Regarded as one of the key protagonists of Eastern European conceptualism, the Romanian artist advocates a radical convergence between the organic and spiritual, an uninhibited immersion of life into art.

Geta BrătescuAtelierul | The Studio

The book is dedicated to Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, one of the most remarkable personalities of the Eastern European postwar avant-garde. The main part of the publication comprises visual materials and texts written by the artist that span several decades of her activity, outlining the exceptional manner in which she has appropriated the lesson of modernism and interrelated it with conceptual challenges.

Andrea Pichl

This publication consists of two essays by Sven Beckstette and Gabriele Knapstein, as well as Andrea Pichl’s photographs, sculptures, and drawings to date.

The publication, conceived by Clegg & Guttmann, is a response to Maier-Reimer’s invitation to present his recent body of work for his contribution to the exhibition “Villa Romana 1905–2013: Das Künstlerhaus in Florenz” at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn.

Rémy ZauggThe Art Museum of My Dreams
or A Place for the Work and the Human Being

In his influential 1986 text, now translated into English for the first time, Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) laid out fundamental ideas on the art museum. For him, the museum is an everyday tool that enables the encounter between viewer and work—raising the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for such a space.

Chantal PontbriandThe Contemporary, the Common
Art in a Globalizing World

The essays in this collection were written in the first decade of the new millennium by the critic, editor, and curator Chantal Pontbriand. Pontbriand examines themes of being-in-common in today’s world and their relation to the development of art practices.

Kirsty BellThe Artist’s House
From Workplace to Artwork

The artist’s house is a prism through which to view not only the artistic practice of its inhabitant, but also to apprehend broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space. Based on a series of interviews and site visits with living artists about the role of their home in relation to their work, Kirsty Bell looks at the house as receptacle, vehicle, model, theater, or dream space.

Attention EconomyJahresring 60: Jahrbuch für moderne Kunst

The 60th Jahresring takes the form of a compilation of artist interviews and offers a snapshot of a highly active art scene that stretches from Berlin, as a new international center for art. Nicolaus Schafhausen put a series of questions to thirty-one art practitioners, less geared toward the artists’ respective praxis and more toward the conditions under which it arises.

The Atlantis Search EnginePoetic Series #1

The Atlantis Search Engine, the first edition in the Poetic Series, features a selection of poetry and prose by Matthew Dickman, Roman Baembaev, Josef Strau, and drawings produced specifically by John Kelsey based on the film The Canyons.

John Smith

This comprehensive new monograph on the influential British artist-filmmaker—renown for his playful and formally ingenious subversion of the everyday world—contains essays by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer, and Ethan de Seife.

Nina Möntmann (Ed.)Scandalous
A Reader on Art and Ethics

Recent encounters between art and real life, the ubiquity of images of violence and humiliation in visual culture and the media, and the persistence of controversial debates on public and participatory art projects are raising fundamental questions about the importance of ethical decisions in art and curating. How far can provocation in art go, before it becomes cynical and abusive? Does “good censorship” exist? Are ethical decisions seen as more urgent in participatory art?

Gavin Butt, Irit RogoffVisual Cultures as Seriousness

The contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to “serious” intellectual activity in recent years. Set against this context, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff raise the question of “seriousness” in art and culture. What is seriousness exactly, and where does it reside? Is it a desirable value in contemporary culture?

Astrid Schmetterling, Lynn TurnerVisual Cultures as Recollection

Memory has become a major preoccupation in the humanities in recent decades, be it individual and collective memory, cultural and national memory, or traumatic memory and the ethics of its representation. Drawing on these complex concerns, Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner focus on distinct films—a series of short meditations on the September 11, 2001, attacks commissioned by Alain Brigand and collectively titled 11’09”01 – September 11 (2002), and Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001).

Largely due to the “linguistic turn” that has dominated the humanities since the mid-twentieth century, many contemporary scholars and artists habitually equate works of art with highly coded texts to be deciphered, deconstructed, or otherwise interpreted. Within this quest to consider art differently, Jorella Andrews and Simon O’Sullivan pay attention to the asignifying character of art, or simply its affective qualities.

Barry SchwabskyWords for Art
Criticism, History, Theory, Practice

Walter Benjamin’s views on color, E. H. Gombrich’s theory of perception, Mel Bochner’s and Liz Kotz’s narratives of Conceptualism, and Sarah Thornton’s peregrinations in the “art world” are but a few of the topics explored in this volume of essays. In an era of hyper-specialization and rigid academic protocols, Barry Schwabsky revives a form of criticism one imagined barely existed—a criticism of varied interests and passionate opinions.

e-flux journal
Martha RoslerCulture Class

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today’s soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions.

Deborah LigorioSurvival Kits

For years now our lives have been shaped by a crisis impacting both our economy and our personal lives. But what is ultimately in crisis? Survival Kits offers twelve perspectives on this issue—from fields as diverse as philosophy, politics, media theory, environmental activism, feminism, post-human theory, literature, geopolitics, art, and economics.

GelatinLoch

Gelatin's exhibition “Loch,” and the week-long performance that preceded it, form the basis for this book. The catalogue comprehensively documents the Austrian art collective’s elaborate site-specific performance at the 21er Haus in Vienna (June 5–September 29, 2013).

A fundamental reordering of artistic production and a transformation of the art field are about to take place. Heated debates have been sparked over new forms of work, public subsidies, and the expanding impact of the creative industries. Independent education programs, self-organized urban planning, and artistic practices in the field of scientific research, among other initiatives, have unfolded over the last few years. This publication addresses this wide field, focusing on theoretical reflections and insights into alternative artistic working models.

Zin TaylorLichen Voices/Stripes and Dots

This catalogue accompanies Taylor’s exhibition “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 5)” at Fogo Island Gallery, which follows his two-part residency with Fogo Island Arts in 2010 and 2012. Featuring essays by Zoë Gray and Saelan Twerdy, and Taylor in conversation with Patrick Staff and Robin Simpson, the book also presents the artist’s portfolio An Index Describing the Individual 19 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots Arranged on a Vitrine Made of Brass and Glass.

Douglas CouplandShopping in Jail
Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century

In Douglas Coupland's writing, the doldrums of a world afflicted by the pains of dotcom booms and busts, the ascendency of subcultures to pop cultures, and the subsequent struggle for identity are counterbalanced by droll, personal, and incisive analyses. This collection of nonfiction essays provides an illuminating meander through what we call culture today.

Ekaterina Degot, David Riff (Eds.)Monday Begins on Saturday

Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly, a new triennial of contemporary art.

Many postwar American artists were influenced by French philosophy, literary studies, and social sciences. French Theory in American Art examines some of the main historical conditions of this reception.

Sven LüttickenHistory in Motion
Time in the Age of the Moving Image

The moving image has irrevocably redefined our experience and construction of history. In the contemporary economy of time, history has become an image in motion, a series of events animated and performed through various media. Analyzing a variety of films, video pieces, and performances, Sven Lütticken evaluates the impact that our changing experience of time has had on the actualization of history in the present.

The exhibition “The Whole Earth” is an essay composed of cultural-historical materials and artistic positions that critically address the rise of the image of “One Earth” and the ecological paradigm associated with it. The accompanying publication includes image-rich visual essays that explore key themes: “Universalism,” “Whole Systems,” “Boundless Interior,” and “Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation,” among others.

Cerith Wyn EvansThe What If?... Scenario (after LG)

This catalogue accompanies the eponymous exhibition at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna and brings together threads and voices of leading contemporary artists, scientists, and theoreticians exploring Cerith Wyn Evans’s polyphonic oeuvre.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #5 Summer 2013

Conceived while in residency at the library of the Goethe-Institut New York, this issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library used the context of the hosting institution as a thematic starting point. Germany, and often the author’s specific relationship to the German language, is the unifying thread that unites these diverse pieces.

Kate NewbyLet the other thing in

In Kate Newby’s site-responsive installations, handcrafted and found objects are often combined with words or phrases to form artworks that engage with the particularities of place. The New Zealand artist’s intimate engagement with materials and nonhierarchical involvement with space exhibit a sophisticated understanding of the role that architecture plays in the shaping of thought and perception, our sense of self in the body and in community.

Marie-Louise EkmanNo Is Not an Answer
On the Work of Marie-Louise Ekman

No Is Not an Answer is the largest presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s art ever featured in the form of a book. As one of the most influential artists in Sweden in the postwar period, Ekman was both part of Swedish pop and the rebellious underground in the ’60s and ’70s.

Milena Hoegsberg, Cora Fisher (Eds.)Living Labor

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

In its ninth volume, the Solution series departs from its previous geopolitical focus on regions and countries. The issue becomes the infinite prospect of connection as well as transformation: this book explores the biopolitical and psychosexual topic of love.

Greg Lynn (Ed.)Archaeology of the Digital

Archaeology of the Digital delves into the genesis and establishment of digital tools for design conceptualization, visualization, and production at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Conceived as an object-based investigation of four pivotal projects that established distinct directions in architecture’s use of digital tools, the book highlights the dialogue between computer sciences, architecture and engineering that was at the core of these experiments.

Hilke Wagner, Axel Wieder (Eds.)Susanne Kriemann

This publication was created as part of the solo exhibitions “Cold Time” at the Kunstverein Braunschweig and “Modelling (Construction School)” at Arnolfini in Bristol. Even if the exhibitions were organized entirely independently of one another, the joint effort in producing this catalogue made it possible to go beyond simple exhibition documentation and provide a more in-depth view into the work of Kriemann.

EPis the first critically underpinned series of publications that fluidly move between art, design, and architecture. The first volume is devoted to the activities of the Italian avant-garde between 1968 and 1976. While emphasizing the multiple correspondences between collectives and groups like Arte Povera, Archizoom, Superstudio, and figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976 also highlights previously overlooked spaces, works, and performances generated by Zoo, Gruppo 9999, and Cavart.

Joanna Warsza (Ed.)Ministry of Highways
A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi

Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. Taking the exhibition “Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back”(2010) as its starting point, this guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country’s post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi.

Donatien GrauThe Age of Creation

In the last two hundred years, “art” has become one of the most fetishized concepts in Western civilization. The idea according to which certain people—also known as artists—would provide the world with their inner vision is a modern myth, but has proved to be a contemporary reality. Since so much art now considers itself as cultural production, mystical creation has been turned into a minority paradigm. The Age of Creation analyzes the entrance of art into culture at large.

Joshua SimonNeomaterialism

Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials.

Gardar Eide EinarssonVersuchsstation des Weltuntergangs

Over the past decade Gardar Eide Einarsson’s exhibition practice has followed a highly consistent thematic trajectory, continuously tracing out what one could call an “iconography of resistance.” The signs and symbols we can read out of Einarsson’s works often refer to fundamental conflictual structures between a society of control following September 11, 2001, and the individual’s rebellion against and threat to central power.

The work of art has often been a battleground—its decorative and formal aspects positioned against its nature as an embodiment of cognitive acts. Leonardo da Vinci’s claim that art be a “cosa mentale” is winning at last: recent debates around art schools and their methods, of which this book is a vast survey, demonstrate that, now more than ever, art is considered the result of a thinking process.

Thomas Thiel (Ed.)Schaubilder

In recent years, it has been possible to discern a growing interest in diagrams. The exhibition "Schaubilder" (Diagrams) explores how these developments affect the worlds of images in contemporary art. This publication presents ten artists who deal with diagrammatic forms in their work. The additional text contributions from the perspectives of art theory, philosophy, and information design encourage an ongoing discussion of the theme.

Dénes FarkasEvident in Advance

“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?," Wittgenstein asked himself in "On Certainty." Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence of this world: a world as he found it. Hysterically reproduced paper maquettes of choreographed architecture, imprisoned within a clumsy, photographic frame, are abstract shelters for imagined and unspoken texts. Words are characters in performance of a world as a text.

Thomas Keenan, Tirdad Zolghadr (Eds.)The Human Snapshot

The Human Snapshot draws upon a conference of the same name organized by the LUMA Foundation and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. The conference contributions and subsequent essays examine contemporary forms of humanism and universalism as they circulate and are produced in art and photography.

The starting point of this exhibition and subsequent publication is the novel The Man Who Was Thursday by British poet G. K. Chesterton from 1908, a mysterious crime story about a seven-headed anarchist council functioning in a world of permanent emergency. Yet in the end, the real danger emanates from artists and intellectuals.

T. J. DemosReturn to the Postcolony
Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness.

Jos de Gruyter & Harald ThysOptimundus
M HKA 08 02 13 - 19 05 13

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s art casts a merciless perspective on reality. Through their numerous artistic approaches—including installations, video, drawing, sculpture, performance, and photographs—the artist duo visualize their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. This book accompanies their major exhibition at M HKA of the same title.

Charlotte BirnbaumPies, Pâtés, and Pastries
Secrets Old and New of the Art of Cooking
On the Table III

Pies, pâtés, and pastries are the noblest of foods. Their inner life is always a secret; their outer form, a sculpture. No other dishes are so well suited to surprises and culinary amusements.

Marcel Duchamp/Ulf LindeDe ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde

Ulf Linde is without doubt one of the world’s most important interpreters of Marcel Duchamp’s art. For more than half a century, he has pursued intense studies of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre and has made perfect replicas of all his major works. His as-yet unpublished manuscript scrutinizing the mathematical principles behind Duchamp’s art reveals what Linde claims to be the key to Duchamp’s poetic universe.

Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.)Behave Like an Audience

Behave Like an Audience is a limited-edition vinyl commissioned and produced by Mai Abu ElDahab, and features musical tracked penned by a group of artists ElDahab worked with at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, and performed by the musical trio Concert.

Apolonija ŠušteršičSelected Projects, 1995–2012

Published on the occasion of her project at MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in León (January–June 2013), this publication offers the first comprehensive survey on the work of Slovenian artist/architect Apolonija Šušteršič.

Jorge PardoTecoh

Tecoh is a sprawling series of buildings designed by the artist Jorge Pardo deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far the artist’s most ambitious work to date. This book offers the only available glimpse of the project, as it was primarily conceived as a private residence.

Beatrice GibsonThe Tiger's Mind

In 2010, a production process was instigated by filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, with the intention of using British composer Cornelius Cardew’s musical score The Tiger’s Mind as a means of producing speech. Since the score concerns the changing relations between six characters in production, practitioners from other fields (musicians and visual artists) were invited to three conversations at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Kunstverein in Amsterdam, and CAC Brétigny.

Clara Meister (Ed.)Compilation of Translations: One Year at Ludlow 38

The publication gives an overview of the 2012 curatorial year at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38. Curatorial resident Clara Meister’s program focused on different concepts of translation, bringing together an interdisciplinary exhibition program based on the assumption that artistic ideas can be translated into disparate forms and therefore can take varying modes of expression.

Sharon LockhartSharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol

The catalog Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol accompanies the eponymous exhibition at TBA21 in Vienna which consists of a complex installation of videos, photographs, and archival material, composing a subtle and sensuous portrait of the Israeli choreographer, dancer, researcher, and textile artist Noa Eshkol.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #4Winter 2012

Devised by Stuart Bailey, Lars Bang Larsen, Angie Keefer, and David Reinfurt, this bulletin is based on Larsen’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. The idea was to contrive a popular version of his academic thesis by editing it psychedelically.

FuturefarmersA Variation on Powers of Ten

A Variation on Powers of Ten uses the opening picnic scene of Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten as score to guide ten discussions. The result of a research-based residency at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the publication includes four essays and ten interviews with researchers whose work relates to one of the magnitudes of ten of the 1968 IBM-commissioned film.

Ruth BuchananThe weather, a building

This new artist book by Ruth Buchanan charts three narratives associated with the life of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, which acts as an example of the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained.

The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making.

Lene BergLene Berg

“The work of Lene Berg probes questions about the difference between truth and falsehood, between reality and fantasy, between veracity and mendacity. Berg crafts short, witty, incisive, and often humorous filmic stories, using lo-fi means such as drawing, photocopies, collage, and her own as well as found footage, to interrogate the question of history and historiography,” so states Katerina Gregos. These themes, among others, are explored in Berg’s latest film, Kopfkino (2012), which was filmed over the course of two days in Berlin and focuses on eight women as they exchange stories about their line of work—the fulfillment of sexual fantasies.

Katja Gretzinger (Ed.)In a Manner of Reading Design

If design aims at taking a critical stance, it needs to change its acquaintance with knowledge and develop its own discourse to understand the underlying conceptions that are at play. The metaphor of the "blind spot" proposes the perspective of looking at what is implicit or unnoticed in our perception. By doing so, it seeks to open up common readings of what design is and can do. In a Manner of Reading Design features different texts and artistic contributions, opening up a debate that reminds us of our dependence on the other in any conception—and any project design might aspire to.

Maria Fusco, Ursula MayerGonda

Gonda, a new book by Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco, experiments in cinematic and linguistic registers through polyphonic monologue. Taking the form of a ciné-roman, the book is based on Mayer’s 16mm film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Maria Fusco and commissioned by Film London.

Jessica WarboysVanelephant

In the fall of 2010, Jessica Warboys discovered photographic portraits of dancer Hélène Vanel in the disused Bibliothèque Smith-Lesouëf, Nogent-sur-Marne. Warboys later discovered an unpublished manuscript by Vanel in the adjoining archives of the Maison nationale des artistes, a retirement home for elderly artists.The artist then translated the texts herself and condensed the drama, and thus shifted Vanel’s role from manuscript to script.

Steve RushtonMasters of Reality

Masters of Reality brings together the first collection of texts by Steve Rushton exploring the interrelations between art, anthropology, social sciences, psychology, media, politics, and economy. Central to Rushton’s research is an investigation into the conception of feedback, social control, and the culture of “self-performance.”

Omer Fast5,000 Feet Is the Best

This publication focuses on a single work of art: 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) by artist Omer Fast.With this cinematic video work, Fast has entered into a discussion about one of the most pressing issues today, namely drone surveillance and warfare—that is, the use of unmanned planes operated by “pilots” on the ground.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.

Tirdad ZolghadrPlot

A speculative, existentialist fiction on the melancholia of revolutionary politics and good intentions, Tirdad Zolghadr’s novel is composed of the logorrhea of online communication and unpublished manuscripts. At the start of the New Zion Empire in 2016—a time of unprecedented dystopic stability with superpower coalitions, generous drone regiments, awesome capital investments, and more soft-power propaganda than ever employed in modern history—Sergeant Jim of the United States is taken hostage in Yazd, once the proud seat of the Persian Empire, and becomes a wildly popular mouthpiece for Third World rhetoric, postcolonial jingles, anti-imperial anecdotes, and anti-Zionist mottos.

Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al.The Mattering of Matter
Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society

On August 7, 1999, Tom McCarthy founded the International Necronautical Society (INS) with a public presentation of the "Founding Manifesto," a touchstone that would inform the organization’s proceedings for years to come. Composed of official committee members and illicit “agents,” the INS harks back to early twentieth-century avant-gardes, producing declarations, reports, public hearings, broadcasts, and research documents, as well as orchestrating more covert media infiltrations, all governed by the objective, set out in the "Founding Manifesto," of mapping, entering, and occupying the space of death through literature, philosophy, culture, and technology.

The New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co.—whose name today is largely synonymous with that of its gallerist, Colin de Land (1955–2003)—represents a gallery practice in which a decided deviation from conventional models overlaps with successful activities within the framework of the art market. Faced with the obvious risk of romanticization, it appears all the more important to pursue an understanding of how American Fine Arts, Co. functioned as a gallery.

Hito Steyerle-flux journal
The Wretched of the Screen

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.

Fabian Marti, Cristina Ricupero (Eds.)Cosmic Laughter No. 1

Beyond the lunatic fringe views regarding the end of the world, a more constructive reading of the phenomenon is found in new age circles claiming that 2012 might be the beginning of a higher consciousness in humanity, coming to the realization that, in fact, Western systems have not brought prosperity and fulfillment to everybody as once imagined.

Invalid Format is an archive of the widespread publishing activities of Triple Canopy, the editorial collective and online magazine based in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. The book explores how works produced for the screen might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context while also fully inhabiting the page.

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

Zak KyesZak Kyes Working With...

To accompany his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, this book presents the work of the Swiss-American graphic designer Zak Kyes. In collaboration with the curator, Barbara Steiner, the exhibition and publication bring together a range of works by Kyes, as well as works by a host of collaborators that includes architects, artists, writers, curators, editors, and graphic designers, presenting contemporary graphic design as a practice that mediates, and is mediated by, its allied disciplines.

Bulletins of The Serving Library #3Summer 2012

This issue of Bulletins of the Serving Library doubles as a catalog of sorts to "Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language," a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.)After Berkeley
Objectif Exhibitions, 2010–2011

Following From Berkeley to Berkeley: Objectif Exhibitions, 2008–2010, this publication is the second in a two-part series of interviews with artists who exhibited at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, between 2010 and 2011. The interviews are accompanied by a collection of secondary and parallel material produced in collaboration with each artist.

What is “work” today and what is its relation to art? What is the position of the artist if “creativity” has become a commodity? How can the artist’s conditions of production be described, and what role can art and architecture play in societal change?

Keren CytterD.I.E. Now
The True Story of John Webber and His Endless Struggle with the Table of Content

Published on the occasion of the performance of Show Real Drama, this monographic publication concentrates on a performance Keren Cytter developed for If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’s edition on Masquerade (2008–10).

In April 2010, during his residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Akram Zaatari attempted to write, improvise, and deliver a conversation with an imagined Israeli filmmaker, giving him the name Avi Mograbi. In this conversation, Zaatari revisits photographs he made in his teenage years during the Israeli occupation of his hometown, Saida, in 1982, and imagines what an Israeli filmmaker could have experienced in the same period.

Erik Niedling with Ingo NiermannThe Future of Art: A Diary

The Future of Art: A Diary is the sequel to The Future of Art: A Manual (2011), in which Niedling joined Niermann on his search for a new, epic artwork. The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition “18.10.1973–29.02.2012” at the Neues Museum Weimar.

Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms that anticipate, surpass, or even bend around their purported origins in canonical European and American regimes of representation, as well as what we currently understand to be the horizon of artistic practice.

Encounters with art engage various conditions of interiority—whether through psychic spaces or specific physical environments, such as museums and private residences. Through diverse discursive modes—commissioned essays, conversations and talks, historical writings, and artistic projects—this anthology, the first CCS Readers volume, examines the poetics and politics of interior experience within the frame of contemporary art.

Juliane RebentischAesthetics of Installation Art

In recent years, debates surrounding the concept of art have focused in particular on installation art, as its diverse manifestations have proven to be incompatible with the modern idea of aesthetic autonomy. Here, Juliane Rebentisch asserts that installation art does not, as is often assumed, dispute aesthetic autonomy per se, and rather should be understood as calling for a fundamental revision of this very concept.

Maria Lind (Ed.)Performing the Curatorial
Within and Beyond Art

Because the curatorial has clear performative sides, ones that seek to challenge the status quo, it also includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all practices working with defining, preserving, and mediating cultural heritage in a wider sense. Is curating therefore essentially an act of translation? If so, with what purpose, and can it be performed elsewhere?

Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice is the second volume in the Actors, Agents and Attendants series of publications and symposia initiated by SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain to investigate the role of cultural practice in the organization of the public domain.

Maria LobodaOh, Wilderness

“Verbal sculptures” and “strange archaeologies”—Maria Loboda’s recent works expose prior events through sparse details of entangled secrets, material contradictions, and masked collusions. Oh, Wilderness demonstrates the artist’s aesthetic equation between language and materiality as it works the other way around, translating materials expressive of a certain weak semiotics to language.

Simon Starling / SuperflexReprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests

Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests brings together seven seminal works by Simon Starling and Superflex in a dialogical setting. These works “collapse” as unstable complexes around pertinent themes whose triangulated speculations are articulated by undisciplined objects, piercing through the layers of time and history and revisiting long-held certainties.

Paul Sietsemainterviews on films and works

Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (June–August 2012), this publication includes interviews and images of the work of the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Sietsema.

Nikolaus Hirsch, Shveta Sarda (Eds.)Cybermohalla Hub

Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts. The Cybermohalla project, which takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood), has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities.

Martin BeckThe Aspen Complex

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition, and brings together yet unpublished archival material and new research on the 1970 IDCA and the Aspen Movie Map.

Matthias Ulrich (Ed.)Playing the City: Interviews

In Playing the City: Interviews, Matthias Ulrich, curator of the Schirn project, asks fifty-one of the involved artists ten central questions about the participatory and collaborative art context. Their answers and comments provide a telling picture of the multiple forms of interactive, cooperative, and interdisciplinary practices in contemporary art.

Yorgos Sapountzis's work appropriates public space and the statues, monuments, and memorials that inhabit it. The Athens-born artist concentrates less on their historical-political meanings and much more on their function as a medium of recollection. Sapountzis consciously tries to ignore historical information about the sculptures and instead allows them to “speak” through their gestures, poses, and ornaments.

Marianne HeierSurplus

Although Marianne Heier abandons the traditional exhibition spaces in connection with her projects, Art with a capital A is still always measured against other social constructs. At this point of intersection, Heier looks at the typical features of the various economies or values of given fields and how they overlap and collide. This project renders visible societal structures and consequences of such structures—of which we are not always aware. By shifting the perspective slightly, we can perhaps glimpse distinct values and new outcomes.

Tobias SpichtigBlue, Red, and Green

The artist book Blue, Red, and Green by Tobias Spichtig is published on the occasion of the exhibition at Ursula Blickle Stiftung, “the blue, the red, the green, the cuboid, and the pyramid.”

Alex ColesThe Transdisciplinary Studio

We have entered a post-post-studio age, and find ourselves with a new studio model: the transdisciplinary. This volume delves into four pioneering transdisciplinary studios—Jorge Pardo Sculpture, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Åbäke—by observing and interviewing the practitioners and their assistants.

Eva GrubingerDecoy

Decoy documents the eponymous exhibition at Landesgalerie Linz in 2011 in which Grubinger presented large-scale sculptural works, all of which referenced the fishing—lures, mooring rings, a dock—and both subtly and explicitly engaged a vocabulary of the alluring.

bankleerfinger in the pie

This monograph features in depth essays on the collective’s work as well as an annotated image section, which highlights bankleer’s recent projects and deployments.

Charlotte Birnbaum (Ed.)The Beauty of the Fold
A Conversation with Joan Sallas
On the Table II

Joan Sallas, a virtuoso of the fold, has meticulously researched and mastered the history and techniques of the art of the fold. With the banquet table as setting, his expertise and philosophy pour forth in the form of splendid, folded linen.

In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Flaca / Tom Humphreys

Emerging from the eponymous exhibition at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Flaca / Tom Humphreys reflects on the London exhibition space, Flaca, that Tom Humphreys organized between 2003 and 2007.

Charlotte MothBleckede 2009 / Rochechouart 2011

Charlotte Moth conceived this book as a further elaboration of her artistic practice, linking different projects that have been realized since 2009.

Maria Lind, Olav Velthuis (Eds.)Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets
A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios

Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets maps and analyzes the complex and contested entanglements of contemporary art and its commercial markets.

Tariq RamadanOn Super-Diversity

Invited to reflect on the notion of “super-diversity,” the acclaimed scholar Tariq Ramadan sets out an argument that foregrounds universalism as a necessary, if devalued, horizon, and offers a critique of the uses and limits of dialogue and discourse within the day-to-day practice of diversity.

Eva Grubinger, Jörg Heiser (Eds.)Sculpture Unlimited

Against the historical backdrop of expansions of the notion of sculpture—from Auguste Rodin to Rosalind Krauss and beyond—one could think that the sculptural discipline has become defined by its near arbitrary malleability, since practically anything can be construed as sculpture. Yet interest in the history of sculpture seems to be experiencing a revival, including traditional techniques and production methods, which often appear appealing, even radical, in the age of the Internet and social media.

Hassan KhanThe Agreement
Five Stories by Hassan Khan

Artist, writer, and musician Hassan Khan explores the margins at which a vernacular, be it linguistic or formal, attains its stature. Through a series of narrative portraits and accompanying images of his recent sculptures, Khan’s seemingly ubiquitous tales are in fact an attempt to let a story tell itself.

Design Act: Socially and Politically Engaged Design Today—Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics is a project that presents and discusses contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues.

This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure.

Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health examines changing political uses of the concept of care in neoliberal democracies and asks how artists, architects, and designers both contribute to and attempt to critique its social manifestations.

Cinema was the single medium capable of capturing what Alexander Kluge describes as the “the impossible moment”—a moment we couldn’t think of beforehand, and which cannot be repeated later. Thus cinema leads the way to what later becomes reality: to cities, bridges, ideas, gestures, skyscrapers, literature, and art. This anthology traces some of the paths of this “becoming.”

Tauba AuerbachFolds

In connection with Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition “Tetrachromat” at Bergen Kunsthall, Folds presents Auerbach’s eponymous painting series for the first time in book form. In these paintings Auerbach twists and folds the canvas before applying the paint. Transferred to the medium of the book, the paintings are presented here in a new and unexpected way alongside mathematical diagrams and three texts.

Martti Kalliala with Jenna Sutela and Tuomas ToivonenSolution 239–246
Finland: The Welfare Game

Welcome to Finland, a young land of rapid aging, where newly founded institutions are already outmoded and geographic impediments are a constant crippling agent. As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Finland: The Welfare Game by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments.

Chris EvansGoofy Audit

The work of artist Chris Evans evolves through conversations with people from various walks of life, selected in relation to their public position or symbolic role—resulting in sculptures, letters, drawings, film scripts, and unwieldy social situations. To all intents and purposes, this publication is a comprehensive survey of his work, isolating and documenting the formalities of objects and situations.

Markus MiessenThe Nightmare of Participation
(Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality)

The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

Binna Choi, Axel Wieder (Eds.)Casco Issues XII: Generous Structures

Casco Issues is a magazine published by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, which explores recurring issues that emerge from Casco’s program. The twelfth edition of Casco Issues, Generous Structures, is a playful enquiry into "playfulness" as a value in critical cultural practice. It positions alternative notions of playing against the grain of neoliberal ideologies of "lifelong learning" and "work as play."

Mai Abu ElDahab, Binna Choi, Emily Pethick (Eds.)Circular Facts

Circular Facts is a collaborative endeavor between three European contemporary art organizations: Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; and The Showroom, London, which acted as an informal think tank and a mutual support structure for the production and dissemination of artistic projects. The publication aims to gather a spectrum of perspectives to explore the roles of specific initiatives within their particular localities.

Antje MajewskiThe World of Gimel
How to Make Objects Talk

The alchemy of things is at the core of Antje Majewski’s multimedia project, which aims at rethinking the representation and meaning of objects in the form of a highly personal and quasi-surreal collection. Based on the investigation of various museums and collections Majewski presents a utopian and subversive take on how to make objects talk.A German-language version of this publication is also available!

This publication compiles a series of essays on contemporary art written by leading art historians and experts. First presented in lecture format at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, these essays reflect the wealth of the exchange that exists between theoretical writing and artistic thinking, sharing the fascination that each of these authors has with both the work of an artist and how this work functions in relation to larger contexts and broader ideas.

Ingo Niermann with Erik NiedlingThe Future of Art: A Manual

In 1831 Honoré de Balzac wrote a short story, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” in which he invented the abstract painting. Almost 200 years later, writer Ingo Niermann tries to follow in his footsteps to imagine a new epoch-making artwork. Together with the artist Erik Niedling he starts searching for the future of art and, seeking advice, meets key figures of the art world.

The publication includes a series of interviews with artists who exhibited at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, over a two-year period, along with a collection of secondary and parallel material produced in collaboration with each artist. Ranging from the humorous to the pseudo-scientific, the artists discuss the methods by which their research is transformed into practice. Both the artists and the interviewers constitute a community of active and concerned arts practitioners who, through art-making, writing, curation and teaching, deal with issues of representation, behavioral patterns and historical legacy.

Through the contribution of internationally renowned artists and scholars, this anthology explores how the aesthetics of new media technology and its spatial implementations affect the judicial system in relation to fundamental concepts such as truth and representation.

Pauline J. Yao, Rania Ho, Wang Wei (Eds.)3 Years: Arrow Factory

Arrow Factory is an independently run art space located in a narrow 200-year old alleyway in the center of Beijing. This publication provides a valuable look into the uniqueness of our contemporary situation, and captures for posterity the fleeting connections that situate Arrow Factory in China’s larger economic, intellectual, and artistic zeitgeist.

Merlin CarpenterThe Opening

This book presents the work of London-based artist Merlin Carpenter. Focused on a series of exhibitions entitled, The Opening—marked by the fact that all the paintings presented were produced at the galleries during the exhibition openings—the book documents all six events via text and snapshot-like images.

Mark von SchlegellNew Dystopia

New Dystopia is contemporary author Mark von Schlegell’s illustrated screenplay-as-science fiction novel. In conjunction with the curator Alexis Vaillant, von Schlegell curated an exhibition of contemporary art at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, “Dystopia,” based on his novel’s dystopian-present.

Charlotte Birnbaum (Ed.)Three Banquets for a Queen
On the Table I

In 1668, Queen Christina of Sweden was greeted in Rome with three spectacular banquets that surpass all historical precedents and successors in the register of extravagant gastronomy. As the first publication of her series, On the Table, Charlotte Birnbaum presents Antonio degli Effetti’s newly translated seventeenth-century text, which elaborately describes the three feasts in all their sumptuous and performative glory.

R. H. QuaytmanSpine

Spine resembles a catalogue raisonné of R. H. Quaytman’s work produced since 2001, the year the artist began organizing paintings in what are called “Chapters.” Conceived and written by Quaytman, this more than 400-page volume presents a full decade’s output.

Brice DellspergerBrice Dellsperger’s Body Double

Brice Dellsperger's Body Double is the first monograph ever published on the artist's already cult film productions, with a long essay by art historian Marie Canet that addresses filmic remake, but also issues of models, gender politics, and representational chaos.

When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more compelling?

Bulletins of The Serving Library #1Summer 2011

Bulletins of The Serving Library is the new biannual publication from Dexter Sinister, which continues where the final issue of their previous house journal DOT DOT DOT left off.

Ewa Lajer-BurcharthChardin Material

Adapted from the lecture she delivered at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s essay explores the dimension of self-reflexivity in the work of eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Siméon Chardin.

The publication A Cookbook for Political Imagination accompanies the exhibition “… and Europe will be stunned” for the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Biennale of Art in Venice. This is not a traditional exhibition catalogue but rather a manual of political instructions and recipes, delivered by more than forty international authors.

Birgit MegerleBirgit Megerle

Birgit Megerle’s figurative and abstract paintings are characterized by an artificial, rigid, and stage-like atmosphere. This exhibition catalogue accompanied Megerle’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Lingen in the fall of 2010.

Andreas ErikssonNordic Pavilion
54th Venice Biennale, 2011

Andreas Eriksson employs a variety of techniques and media, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art and, more recently, film. Trivial events and observations from everyday life and nature set off his metaphorical and existential contemplations.

Dora GarcíaMad Marginal Cahier #2
The Inadequate

The Inadequate is the second cahier of the Mad Marginal project started by artist Dora García in November 2009. It is presented as the publication for the Spanish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale 2011.

Zin TaylorGrowth

Zin Taylor has become known internationally for his elaborate installations encompassing elements of performance and sculpture along with drawing, printing, and video. This artist book is published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung, “The Units,” from May 29 to July 10, 2011.

Brian DillonSanctuary

Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual.

Christoph SchlingensiefGerman Pavilion
54th Venice Biennale, 2011

This catalogue pays tribute to one of Germany’s most radical, experimental, and progressive voices. With contributions from over thirty internationally renowned curators, artists, critics, theorists, directors, and practitioners.

This inter- and transdisciplinary collection of essays by philosophers, artists, critics, and art historians, reconsiders the place of the aesthetic in contemporary art, with reference to four main themes: aesthetics as “sensate thinking”; the dissolution of artistic limits; post-autonomous practices; and exhibition-values in a global artworld.

Sung Hwan KimKi-da Rilke

The artist’s book Ki-da Rilke evolved in relation to the exhibition “Line Wall” by Sung Hwan Kim. In the book, Kim engages with the work of the Prague born poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).

MomusSolution 214–238
The Book of Japans

As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Japan, or The Book of Japans, makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the “far.” The Book of Japans restores a sense of wonder—along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies—by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but also time.

The publication by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson is conceived as a first comprehensive overview / in depth analysis of more than ten years of their artistic practice—leading up to their most current works.

Fia BackströmNordic Pavilion
54th Venice Biennale, 2011

Fia Backström produces events, environments, and projects, which challenge our habitual notions of what constitutes an exhibition—its institutional context, the dialogue with the audience, and even the works of art that are presented.

Markus WeisbeckSurface

For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining this prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years; projects that strongly reveal Surface’s experimental approach and conceptual dexterity, contributing to and informing contemporary graphic design.

Anton VidokleNew York Conversations

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public.

Hans Dickel and Lisa Puyplat (Eds.)Reading Susanne Kriemann

The book is comprised of texts on Susanne Kriemann’s practice and its relation to the concept of Reading in a wider sense: reading photographs, archives, and texts and transforming these into new compositions with photography, urban space, and historiography.

Wendelien van OldenborghA Well Respected Man, or Book of Echoes

The publication unfolds and draws an open-ended connection between individual and collective struggles and (emotional) conflicts intertwined with the colonial and decolonizing histories of Indonesia and the Netherlands by taking two film works by artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, No False Echoes (2008) and Instruction (2009), as points of departure.

April Lamm (Ed.)Hans Ulrich Obrist
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating*
*But Were Afraid to Ask

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book.

Joshua Simon (Ed.)Solution 196–213
United States of Palestine-Israel

Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.

Miki Kratsmanall about us

Miki Kratsman’s photographs show the complex reality of everyday Israeli life and its many different guises and narratives.

Poor Man's Expression examines the relationship between film, video, technology, and art, with a particular focus on the reciprocal influences between conceptual art and experimental film.

Valérie MannaertsAn Exhibition—Another Exhibition

An Exhibition—Another Exhibition is the first monograph of the work of Belgian artist Valérie Mannaerts. The book catalogues two solo exhibitions that took place in 2010—“Blood Flow” at Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen, and “Diamond Dancer” at de Appel arts centre.

Alexis Vaillant (Ed.)BigMinis
Fetishes of Crisis

This mini, compact catalogue, written in both French and English, accompanies the exhibition “BigMinis,” at CAPC museum of contemporary art of Bordeaux.

Gabriel Kurijoin the dots and make a point

This monograph documents the solo exhibition at Bielefelder Kunstverein and Kunstverein Freiburg and also focuses on Kuris` marble works since 2006.

Knut ÅsdamThe long gaze, the short gaze

For several decades Norwegian artist Knut Åsdam has worked independently and uncompromisingly with his artistic projects, and he is today considered one of the central contemporary practitioners of film and video art.

The book discusses Mario Pfeifer’s recent 16mm film installation Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974. This installation, consisting of two synchronized, looped, and parallel projected films, takes it point of departure from the first monograph of Baltz’s work, published by Castelli Graphics, New York in 1974.

Alexis Vaillant (Ed.)Options with Nostrils

Options with Nostrils brings together a collection of previously unpublished essays, both theoretical and visual, by artists, curators, a writer, a scholar, and a group of postgraduates from the Piet Zwart Institute’s Fine Art programme in Rotterdam, who together founded the “Office for the Unknown.”

e-flux journal
Boris GroysGoing Public

As the first in the series of e-flux journal readers to be written by a single author, Going Public brings together a collection of influential essays by Boris Groys.

Maria FuscoThe Mechanical Copula

The Mechanical Copula is the first collection of short stories by Maria Fusco. Stripping bare the accord of culture and commodity, this sequence of stories tracks the slimy path of social mobility with serious playfulness and an eye for the absurd.

a labyrinth of realityin which one can get lostor find his/her own way;a theme park constantlyconsuming history;a contemporary Chinese gardenreplete with multiple routes.

John KelseyRich Texts
Selected Writing for Art

Compiled for the first time here, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey’s selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates.

Jan VerwoertTell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want brings together a selection of recent writings by art critic Jan Verwoert for the first time. The book galvanizes central themes Verwoert has been developing in pursuit of a language to describe art’s transformative potential in conceptual, performative, and emotional terms.

Shahryar NashatDownscaled and Overthrown

Downscaled and Overthrown is the first monograph on the work of the Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat.

Andrea Geyer/Katya SanderMeaning Is What Hides the Instability of One’s Position

Andrea Geyer and Katya Sander’s Meaning is what hides the instability of one’s position is an artist’s book; a photographic essay that takes us through spaces of international airports.

Ingo NiermannSolution 186–195
Dubai Democracy

Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy is the fifth book in the Solution series. Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with analytical elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable.

Internal NecessityA Reader Tracing the Inner Logics of the Contemporary Art Field

Internal Necessity was the topic of the Sommerakademie 2009, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. The result is an independent reader that does not aim to merely document the academy 2009, but reflects and develops its topics in a rich diversity of visual and textual forms.

Agnieszka Kurant/Aleksandra WasilkowskaEmergency Exit

The artists Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska are representing Poland at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice 2010, August 29 – November 21, 2010.

Magnus af Petersens (Ed.)Keren Cytter

This catalogue provides the reader with the opportunity to read six of Keren Cytter’s scripts for films that are being shown in the exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May 8 – August 15, 2010.

Angelika Burtscher, Judith Wielander (Eds.)visible
“where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else”

Visible documents a research project by Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in collaboration with Fondazione Zegna. The publication highlights nine curators, who showcase forty-one ways of making art.

SilberkuppeUnder One Umbrella

Under One Umbrella is the first overall presentation of Silberkuppe, one of Berlin’s most outstanding independent spaces for contemporary art.

BLESSRetroperspective Home N° 30 – N° 41

This book brings together visual and written documentation of BLESS's last twelve collections (N° 30–N° 41), continually prompting and challenging the question of where a product begins and ends.

E-flux journal: What Is Contemporary Art? puts the apparent simplicity and self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists, and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall or default category.

Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw (Eds.)The Power of Judgment
A Debate on Aesthetic Critique

Comprised of a lecture by Christoph Menke and two respective responses to it by Daniel Loick and Isabelle Graw, The Power of Judgment both attests to the importance of judgment in art criticism and argues against its determining verdicts.

Class inevitably raises awkward questions for the protagonists of contemporary art—about their backgrounds, patrons, and ideological partialities. Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates this latent yet easily overlooked issue, which has been historically eclipsed by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality.

Jean-Yves LeloupDigital Magma

Writer, DJ, and French sound artist, Jean-Yves Leloup has followed the evolution of electronic music from its first appearance in Europe at the end of the eighties. A fortunate witness to the electronic scene, he is also interested in all questions relative to contemporary art and digital technologies.

Maria Lind (Ed.)Philippe Parreno

This publication focuses on “Philippe Parreno,” an exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College which consists of a selection of Parreno’s films and collaborative projects.

Haegue YangSiblings and Twins

Siblings and Twins, a catalogue of Haegue Yang’s installation works, documents the same-titled exhibition held at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. The exhibition was part of a serial project designed by Yang in which she staged additional installations in other international exhibition sites.

Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.

Since the early 1980s, Friedl has written on a variety of subjects. The book Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981–2009 compiles for the first time a representative selection of his (partly unpublished) texts, along with a series of interviews.

Today, the art world is not dominated by a small group of insiders. According to Graw, the art economy has been transformed from a retail business into an industry that produces visuality and meaning. Written during both the height of the most recent art boom in early 2008 and its sudden collapse thereafter, High Price upholds a unique position towards the art world's inner contradictions between symbolic meaning and monetary value.

Joseph GrigelyExhibition Prosthetics

Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely is the first in the Bedford Press Editions series of artists’ books edited by Zak Kyes. The series will engage with publications as a primary medium of practice, enabling artists to explore the inherent constraints and possibilities of the printed document.

Bettina FunckePop or Populus
Art Between High and Low

The alienation between modern high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art. This book develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art’s unprecedented popularity.

What happens when you look at design as some thing more than a service-based relationship between client and designer? What new strategies and models help to question and challenge the limits of design? What outer circumstances influence this kind of practice?

Friedrich KunathHome wasn’t built in a day

In his drawings, texts, objects, photographs, and videos, German artist Friedrich Kunath deals with such themes as longing, melancholy, loneliness, wanderlust, and wistfulness from a subjective viewpoint. He combines personal life experiences with literary, musical, or art historical references into visual, ironic commentaries in various media.

The Otolith GroupA Long Time Between Suns

A Long Time Between Suns has been edited as an archival assemblage of The Otolith Group’s two-venue solo exhibition at Gasworks (February 15 – April 5, 2009) and The Showroom (September 8 – October 25, 2009).

Helke BayrlePortikus Under Construction

For many years now, Helke Bayrle has documented the activities of the Portikus. The result is a unique collection of artist portraits. Portikus Under Construction presents the last decade, edited backstage material that the viewer of the finished exhibitions never sees.

Dominic EichlerWritten All Over Us

Written All Over Us constitutes the first book of poems by art critic, artist, musician, and curator Dominic Eichler. With illustrations by Nairy Baghramian, Julian Göthe, Shahryar Nashat, Henrik Olesen, and Danh Vo.

Dexter SinisterPortable Document Format

This book explores contemporary publishing in its broadest, most exploded sense. The first part of this book consists of pieces of writings written since the conception of Dexter Sinister’s New York basement workshop and bookstore in the summer of 2006. The second part consists of reproductions of a series of lithographic proof prints.

The selection of essays included in this book seeks to highlight an ongoing topical thread that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal. It aims at providing a fresh approach to the function of an art journal as something that situates the multitude of what is currently available, and makes that available back to the multitude.

Céline CondorelliSupport Structures

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support.

Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.)The German Issue

I like to stand with one leg on each side of the wall. Maybe this is a schizophrenic position, but none other seems to me real enough.—Heiner Müller, The German Issue

Diango HernándezLosing You Tonight

This artist’s book comes in two volumes and is published on the occasion of Diango Hernández’ exhibition in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, October 4, 2009 – April 5, 2010.

Anton VidokleProduce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat

Anton Vidokle is an artist who captures the attention of 70,000 people each day through e-flux, as well as unitednationsplaza, Martha Rosler Library, and other traveling projects. The essays and interview in this book highlight how two threads in Vidokle’s practice—unobtrusiveness and the freedom of self-sufficiency—are often interwoven, and are at the center of an intellectual proposal that undermines common assumptions about making art in the twenty-first century.

“Crimes against humanity,” especially genocide, have been excluded from amnesty since the Nuremburg Trials. On a cultural level, oblivion by decree becomes an obligation to remember. This reversal is well-intended, but it opens up critical questions: Can memory be permanently established? Is it possible to maintain it in a monument?

Jean-Luc BlancOpera Rock

This is the first monograph on Jean-Luc Blanc’s enigmatic “glam” oeuvre. It documents his retrospective exhibition at the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, where Blanc’s works have been juxtaposed to those of forty-five historic and contemporary artists as well as to numerous artifacts, antiques, jewels, crystals, curios, and naturalia; thus, setting up what shall be considered a “collective retrospective.”

Dave Hullfish BaileyWhat’s Left

Using non-linear heuristic methods and experimental webs of information to draw links between the cities of Utrecht, and Slab City, California, USA, this book brings together speculative proposals that ask basic questions about public space, conceived as a physical and conversational sphere.

The artist book by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber is based on an unpublished text by French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre which is printed as a facsimile and accompanied by essays from Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith.

This book presents a study that conceptualizes, tests, and practically applies the spatial strategy for the European Kunsthalle. The investigation is the result of the activities incorporated into a two-year work practice from 2005 to 2007, an iterative “applied research” informed by resonances between theory and practice.

Cecilia Widenheim (Ed.)Voice Over
On Staging and Performative Strategies in Contemporary Art

Voice Over examines staging, theatricality, and performative strategies in contemporary art practices. With contributions by the artists Miriam Bäckström, Goldin+Senneby, Saskia Holmkvist, Fia-Stina Sandlund, and Geist magazine, an essay by curator and writer Anselm Franke, and an introduction by Cecilia Widenheim.

Mike BouchetSelected Works 1989-2009

This first monograph on American artist Mike Bouchet provides an overview of selected works from the last twenty years.

This book documents Gillick’s project for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009. It contains an introduction by the curator, a text by Liam Gillick about his work as well as the text spoken by the kitchen cat present in the show: “She speaks from the present and fights against the echoes of building’s interior. Its history is one of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desires. Thus, the pavilion becomes a location for endless self-circulating histories that—in the end—represents our history as well.”

Jörg Heiser (Ed.)Fare una scenata / Making a Scene

“Fare una scenata” was the first group show at Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples. It featured the work of nine international artists who are either commissioned new work, or asked to adapt existing work specifically to the picture-gallery and basement spaces of this newly established foundation located in an old palazzo in the heart of Naples.

Sven LüttickenIdols of the Market
Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle

This book reexamines the legacies of modern theoretical and artistic iconoclasm in the context of the current religious-political image wars.

Loris GréaudTrajectories and Destinations
Volume 1

Trajectories and Destinations is an artist book documenting a selection of Loris Gréaud’s works.

Ingo NiermannSolution 1–10
Umbauland

In Solution 1-10: Umbauland, Ingo Niermann devises ten provokingly simple ideas which would see Germany work it out after all, including a new grammar, a new political party, assigning allotment gardens to unemployed people and retirees, and the Great Pyramid, the tallest building of the world which would serve as a democratic tomb for millions of people.

Simon Dybbroe MøllerKompendium

Kompendium is an artist book accompanying the Danish artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Hannover.

Nicolas BourriaudThe Radicant

In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

Klaus WeberLarge Dark Wind Chime (Tritone Westy)

The record Large Dark Wind Chime (Tritone Westy) contains the sound of a wind chime that was recorded in the dome of Secession in Vienna on September 17, 2008 at 2.30 pm. The specifically developed wind chime was installed on the top of the building to send out “bad vibes” over Vienna during the course of Klaus Webers’ solo exhibition.

Justine Frank
Roee RosenSweet Sweat

Erudite, baroque, a dazzling writer and painter but maniacal and all-encompassing in his approach, Roee Rosen keeps erasing the fine line that separates fiction and truth, imagination and reality, just as Sade and Lautréamont have done before him. But this division doesn’t exist anymore. What makes his summa erotica erotic is that, for him as for Georges Bataille, pornography is philosophy.

Olaf HolzapfelNakano Sakaue
Verhandelte Zeichen

Nakano Sakaue documents a series of photographs realized by Olaf Holzapfel during a residency in Tokyo. The artist has depicted a kind of residue from the city’s buildings: neon lights, images, and street signs, which are featured as so many promises for orientation.

MomusSolution 11–167
The Book of Scotlands

At a time when functional independence seems to be a real possibility for Scotland—and yet no one is quite sure what that means—a delirium of visions, realistic and absurd, is necessary.

Klaus WeberSecession

This comprehensive catalogue documents for the first time Klaus Weber’s oeuvre and reveals a recurring sense of limit-experiences: accidents, organism mutations, altered states, incursions from the outside.

Ian WallaceA Literature of Images

This is the first extensive survey catalogue of the work of Vancouver-based artist Ian Wallace—a key figure of the extraordinary artistic ferment in the Canadian city of Vancouver and a pioneer and theorist of its internationally regarded tradition of photo-conceptualism.

The catalogue Unknown Unknown documents recent work by Polish artist and curator Agniezka Kurant and was published on the occasion of Kurant’s presentation at Frieze Projects 2008.

Antje MajewskiMy Very Gestures

This comprehensive catalogue traces the many stages of Antje Majewski’s work, including paintings, photographs, videos, film, installation, and dance theatre.

Markus Miessen (Ed.)East Coast Europe

“East Coast Europe,” which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics.

Diedrich DiederichsenOn (Surplus) Value in Art

Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and postmodern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”

Keren CytterThe seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier’s life in twenty-four chapters

The seven most exciting hours… is an adventure novel based on a true story told in a televised interview by the notorious Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. It describes seven hours in the life of Tibor Klaus Trier—Lars von Trier’s father—from the moment that his wife goes into labor early in the morning until Lars is born.

M/M (Paris)Live Recorded Delay
An Archive of “Il Tempo del Postino”

The book Live Recorded Delay constitutes the only documentation of the legendary project “Il Tempo del Postino.” Conceived by the graphic design team M/M (Paris), it is both a personal archive and an open-ended score for future restagings of the event.

Alexis Vaillant (Ed.)Légende

This book accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the castle of Chamarande in France (May 25–September 28, 2008) which assembles the recent work of fifty international artists who interrogate the artificiality of the current world and render up intensified visions of it.

Documentary practices make up one of the most significant and complex tendencies within art during the last two decades. This anthology seeks to overcome the existing dispersion of texts on these practices and offer new perspectives on this crucial theme.

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.

Ingo Niermann, Jens Thiel (Eds.)Solution 9
The Great Pyramid

German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.The Independent

Jörg HeiserAll of a Sudden
Things that Matter in Contemporary Art

Since the mid-1990s, contemporary art has been booming like never before. There is more of everything—more artists, more collectors, more galleries, more art fairs, more museums, more biennials … with one exception: criteria with which the art of the moment can be understood, judged, praised and, if need be, damned.

Mariana Castillo DeballThese Ruins You See / Estas ruinas que ves

Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one. In addition to studying the distant past through its material vestiges, it is deeply engaged in more recent aspects of politics, education, national identity, and public works. These Ruins You See shifts between politics, history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to find, in the present, the vestiges of archaeological practice.

Daniel BirnbaumThe Hospitality of Presence

Daniel Birnbaum’s The Hospitality of Presence is a study of the concept of otherness in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In the late 1990s it gained international attention in academic circles. It was reviewed favorably in specialized philosophy journals such as Review of Metaphysics and quoted extensively, most notably by Paul Ricoeur in one of the legendary French thinker’s last books.

Thinking Worlds brings together contributions from a two-stage symposium organized in connection with the 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. These essays address questions of the sense and purpose of the “event” in contemporary artistic culture, of the current status of philosophy and aesthetic theory, and of the political significance of artistic interventions.

Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the Institut für Kunstkritik from 2006–07.

Nomeda & Gediminas UrbonasVilla Lituania

The artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas are representing Lithuania at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. This book documents the artistic process of the Villa Lituania project, from its inception in 2006 through to the realization of the first performance event and pavilion exhibition in June 2007. It collects the archival material associated with the challenge of building a pigeon loft in Rome, and a visual and textual artists’ diary.

Perros Negros, Toasting Agency (Eds.)Otra de vaqueros

Otra de vaqueros documents the eponymous residency and exhibition project that took place in Mexico City in 2007.

Michael SailstorferReaktor

This book discusses Michael Sailstorfer’s most recent work, with a special focus on issues of space and site specificity.

Markus Miessen (Ed.)The Violence of Participation

Europe, as a political space, is as conflictual as its constitution. It needs to be designed and negotiated. It is longing for an architecture of strategic encounters. Based on the curation of a space at the 2007 Lyon Biennial, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen has drawn together a group of people to lead conversations around alternative notions of participation, the clash of democratic heterogeneities, and what it means to live in Europe today.

With its 100 questions and answers from major practitioners of the art world and beyond, this book helps to examine the various parameters for a new institutional model.

Peter FriedlWorking at Copan / Trabalhando no Copan

Working at Copan collects interviews with workers and employees at Edifício Copan, a landmark modernist architecture in the center of São Paulo. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer and completed in 1966, it became the largest residential building in Latin America. As a historical building and symbol of “vertical utopia,” it embodies an era of radical political and economic changes within Brazilian society.

Nikolaus HirschOn Boundaries

In several theoretical essays, dialogues on collaborative projects and reflections on his own work, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch explores the critical transformations of contemporary space and its effects on spatial practice.

Bernadette CorporationEine Pinot Grigio, Bitte

Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form. With Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte, Bernadette Corporation asks: How many amateur screenplay writers are there in existence compared to how many amateur novelists? What is the difference between a zombie and an insane cannibal?

Ina BlomOn the Style Site
Art, Sociality, and Media Culture

While style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960’s onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style, one that approaches the question of style itself not just as an art historical “tool” or method of explanation but as a social site in which relations between appearance, recognition and social identity is negotiated.

Daniel BirnbaumChronology
With a Special Project by Paul Chan

In these multiple excursions through recent artist film-installations, Daniel Birnbaum pursues a problem that preoccupied Deleuze in post-war cinema: what is the logic of this peculiar time “after finitude”, based neither in God nor Man, salvation nor destiny; and what does it mean for our brains and our lives to invent new ways to make it visible? With a light wry wit, he thus renews a question, at once aesthetic and philosophical, still very much with us. John Rajchman, Philosopher, Columbia University

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes is dedicated to the ongoing history of the experiment in ﬁlm and art. This book describes and analyses the works of ﬁlmmakers and artists, deﬁning two decades of experiments in Polish avant-garde ﬁlm, and juxtaposes their work with contributions by international artists, who started to work during the last fifteen years.

Mariana Castillo Deball, Irene Kopelman (Eds.)A for Alibi

In the last few decades, a new branch of historical studies, called “experimental history” has begun to investigate scientific processes from a particular perspective, derived from a “hands-on” methodology.

In A for Alibi, the Uqbar Foundation has invited a group of artists to perform research and develop projects using the impressive collection of optical instruments housed in the Utrecht University Museum. Exploring the boundaries of scientific practice and art, the book documents the various stages of this project and reflects on the origins of modern visual culture.

Aleksandra MirThe Meaning of Flowers

Drawing upon the classic notion that flowers are imbued with meanings and a specific set of semantics with idealistic and hopeful connotations, Sicily-based artist Aleksandra Mir has edited and revised the botanical code in a more socially relevant fashion.

The Uncertain States of America Reader constitutes a unique compilation of writing around art and cultural politics in America since 2000.

Manuel RaederPopurri: Agenda 2007

Agenda is an ongoing project by graphic designer Manuel Raeder which focusses on different methods of how people organize, in a personal or non-personal way, their time.

Tanya Leighton (Ed.)In The Poem About Love You Don't Write The Word Love

This book provides a theoretical and critical framework for examining how contemporary art and cinema can still hold out against an experience of vision and of the “visual.”

Jean-Max Colard, Thomas Lélu (Eds.)After

Visually expanding on the art world’s tendency to see the world through the prism of modern and contemporary art, the book depicts some 200 images of found or researched situations taken “after” an artist’s work – occupied realities that are, one might say, signed by the artists.

This book is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative, “bottom-up” models for social or economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures.

Bik Van der Pol Fly Me To The Moon

Taking as their starting point one of the oldest objects in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, a moon rock, artists Bik Van der Pol invited different writers to comment on issues of site-specificity, museum collections, and space law.

This fully illustrated book features for the first time the wide range of Bless’ activity and documents a unique mode of cultural production.

Jennifer HiggieBedlam

Higgie’s prose is fragmentary yet lucid, and the novel evokes the inextricable beauty and terror of Dadd’s sensory journey, while raising some of the philosophical questions it poses about art, language and other minds. Bedlam is a mystery story in which we search for clues as to how an individual might go from precocious talent to parricide.Oliver Harris, Times Literary Supplement

This publication documents both the visionary and utopic framework underlying the creation of modern Turkey.

Josephine MeckseperThe Josephine Meckseper Catalogue No. 2

This fully illustrated, artist-designed catalogue features the most recent work of New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper.

Hans Ulrich Obrist...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop

On closer inspection ... the book covers a dizzying range of subjects, many of them spinning outwards from salient Obristian themes such as artistic collaboration, visionary architecture ("Cedric Price; Curating with Light Luggage"), ecology and waste ("Cloaca Maxima"), and economic development in the Far East ("Cities on the Move") and yet, as if the synthesis of some kind of intellectual centrifuge or particle accelerator experiment, always crystallizes around issues concerning museology and the display reception and discussion of art. Dan Fox, frieze

Michael BeutlerPecafil

Pecafil discusses issues of art in public space and the social-political implications of Michael Beutler’s work.

Christopher Williams’ work operates within the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and, ultimately the history of Modernism.

Tue GreenfortPhotosynthesis

In all of his works the Danish artist demonstrates an interest in an expanded notion of ecology, one that encompasses cultural history and sociopolitics as well as natural resources.

Daniel BirnbaumChronology

A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was presented in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence."

Rirkrit Tiravanija, PLAN.b Publishing oVER

Initiated by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and edited by his Bangkok publishing house PLAN.b, oVER magazine offers an innovative publishing format for artists, photographers, architects, musicians, poets, and other groups and individuals that can join in and collaborate any time, from anywhere.

In the 1990s, Cuban-born artist Diango Hernández started an extended series of drawings which processed the political and economical crisis of Cuba after the collapse of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe.

Nicolas BourriaudPostproduction

Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World is the most recent essay by French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud.

Alex MorrisonGiving the Story a Treatment

Giving the Story a Treatment is the first comprehensive publication on Canadian artist Alex Morrison. Best known for his documentations on the skater culture, Morrison’s videos, photographs and drawings reveal the growing aestheticisation of the political within the cultural spectrum.

Jacob Fabricius (Ed.)The Danish Pavilion – 51st Venice Biennale

Five artists’ books and one general catalogue document the works of Eva Koch, Joachim Koester, Peter Land, Ann Lislegaard, and Gitte Villesen.

The Populism Reader accompanies Populism, an exhibition project in four European cities (Vilnius, Oslo, Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main) exploring the relationships between contemporary art and current populist cultural and political trends.

M/M (Paris)Le Grand Livre

Fully conceived by M/M, this large-format limited edition contains an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an introduction by Cristina Ricupero as well as illustrations from the designers’ recent projects.

Josephine MeckseperThe Josephine Meckseper Catalogue

This book constitutes the first monograph on New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper, with essays by writer/filmmaker John Kelsey and Andrew Ross, Professor in the American Studies program at New York University.

Conceived as a textbook with images rather than an exhibition catalogue, the book reflects on the diversity of fundamentalisms, a phenomenon that is not confined to particular cultures or modes of thought; its intention is to explore the concept in its many forms and multiple origins.

Cerith Wyn Evans“Cerith Wyn Evans”

“Cerith Wyn Evans” provides a comprehensive overview of the artist's body of work.

Andrew Lee Walker, Rachel K. Ward (Eds.)Terminal 5

“It would make a beautiful ruin.” Eero Saarinen

Markus Heinzelmann, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)Markus Schinwald

The films, photos, installations, and graphic artworks of Austrian artist Markus Schinwald create a highly charged aesthetic collection of curios in which the human being stands in the focal point of observation.

Antje Majewski, Ingo Niermann (Eds.)Atomkrieg

Like space travel, nuclear war has for decades created a vast new territory for the imagination. Artists, however, have tended to subordinate themselves to the idea of the impossibility of adequate representation.

Peter FriedlFour or Five Roses

In Four or Five Roses, some 45 narratives by children are presented in the form of a monologue. Edited from numerous interviews and conversations recorded on playgrounds in South Africa, Peter Friedl creates a hybrid genre that is both fictionalised speech and serious counter-voice.

Vanessa Joan Müller and Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)Bernhard Willhelm

This book provides an exemplary look at the work of Bernhard Willhelm, the German fashion designer whose sartorial skills have been hailed by both the fashion industry and the art world.

Gerard ByrneBooks, Magazines, and Newspapers

In his seminal essay, author George Baker links Gerard Byrne’s work to theater and notes that the presence of avant-garde dramatist Bertolt Brecht has never been less discussed, but more widely explored, than in the last decade of artistic practice.

AdornoThe Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. I)

Adorno. The Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. I) comprises theoretical essays which investigate the relevance of Adorno’s critical theory for the present.

AdornoThe Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. II)

Adorno. The Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. II) documents the Adorno exhibition which looks at the connection between contemporary art and Adorno’s writings, with the visual arts becoming a central platform for comparison to Adorno’s main subjects.

Thomas EggererAtrium

Thomas Eggerer's enigmatic depictions of groups and collectives attempt less to portray the singularity of the individual than to explore the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, conformity and hierarchy, as well as the potential of individual or collective utopia.

Michaela MeliánTriangel

This catalogue is the most comprehensive treatment of Michaela Melián’s oeuvre to date and constitutes, with numerous essays and illustrations, a long due documentation of the German artist’s work.

Jean-Charles MasseraSex, Art, and the Dow Jones

How can the events in which we are supposed to participate be translated into experience? How can we represent ourselves in a History that is being written in terms of the economy and the stock market? Along these questions, French author Jean-Charles Massera discusses the works of various artists (Vito Acconci, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, et al.) and film-makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Nanni Moretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, et al.).

John Kelsey, Aleksandra Mir (Eds.)Corporate Mentality

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.

Lars Bang Larsen (Ed.)Sture Johannesson

This book, part psychedelic philosophy, part biography, is the first to present Sture Johannesson’s work in depth, documenting his affiliations with the “high” underground and the punk movement, his activism and his radical exploration of the relationships between art, politics, technology, and human consciousness.

Nicolaus Schafhausen (Ed.)deutschemalereizweitausenddrei

The exhibition deutschemalereizweitausenddrei (german painting two thousand and three) is a response to the needs and social circumstances that have given rise to painting’s present (return to) popularity, and to the strategies young artists are developing to meet this.

Marcel OdenbachBlenden/Blinds

“Odenbach’s art ... criss-crosses the structural hybridization of video-based conceptualism with reflection on the lived experience of globalization.” Kobena Mercer

Julia ScherAlways There

Always There offers a comprehensive survey of American artist Julia Scher’s work. The artist’s installations and performances have always featured a complex relation to techno-social control, demonstrating our complicity in the proliferating technologies used to surveil both our physical and virtual identities.

The central theme of Changing Society: Lithuania is the state of transition in a Post-Soviet state, which has achieved political stability but is still looking for appropriate images to portray itself in the domestic spheres of politics and society.

Kai AlthoffGebärden und Ausdruck

Gebärden und Ausdruck (Gestures and Expression) is the first comprehensive publication on the work of German artist Kai Althoff.

Nicolaus Schafhausen (Ed.)Non-Places

Non-Places questions the redefined relationship between public and private space as well as the phenomenon of modern “nonplaces,” which appear to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time: airports, shopping malls, anonymous new suburbs, or international franchise companies.

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally “unhomely” modern condition.

Nicolaus Schafhausen (Ed.)Neue Kunstkritik

Neue Kunstkritik (New Art Criticism) documents a symposium held at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in September 1999.

Nicolaus Schafhausen (Ed.)Neue Welt

Neue Welt (New World) documents a group show which investigates the political and social restructuring of recent years. Going beyond one-dimensional statements, the texts discuss the redefinition of public space and the effects of a globalized economy.

Karl-Heinz Kohl, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)New Heimat

The exhibition New Heimat documents how the phenomenon of globalization does not necessarily lead to the disappearance of local cultures, but can instead give birth to new, hybrid cultures, in which Western influences experience transformation and traditional cultures are assimilated.

Harun FarockiNachdruck / Imprint
Texte / Writings

“Nachdruck / Imprint” brings together a selection of writings produced by Harun Farocki over the past three decades. They provide an insight into Farocki’s filmic work and its underlying querying of the status, production, and perception of images conveyed technically and through media.

Isa GenzkenUrlaub

Urlaub constitutes Genzken’s multilayered inquiry into the meaning of work and leisure. “Artists never take vacations,” Genzken says, “but the entire art system urgently needs a vacation.”

Liam Gillickfive or six

five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and ideological concerns that have merged in Gillick’s “What if? Scenario.”

Tom BurrLow Slung

With comprehensive texts and illustrations, this book features an artist who belongs among those who have shaped a new form of institutionally critical art.

Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de RooijAfter the Hunt

Dutch artists Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij received international recognition for their seemingly luxurious and self-reflexive 35mm films. This first comprehensive monograph discusses how Dutch painting, Minimal Art, and film conventions become the backdrop for a “cinema in its decontextualized form.”

Susanne Gaensheimer, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)Liam Gillick

This publication constitutes the first comprehensive documentation of the work of British artist Liam Gillick.

Eva Grubinger group.sex

The texts in group.sex discuss political groups and languages, abstract radicalism and art, feminism and bohemianism, social hierarchies, and telematic friendship.